Suggestions for two new methods

[Lippold, Dietmar]

Hi,

I want to suggest to add two new methods to the Vector API. The first method
named "minIndex" returns the first index of a value in a vector and is
suitable for every type of vector. In particular it can be used to determine
the index of the minimum and maximum value of a vector. The second method
named "indexVector" returns a vector of the integer values form zero up to
a given value.

Below are example implementations of the methods. But of course methods
which use intrinsics would probably be much more efficient.

public static IntVector indexVector(int elementNumber) {
    IntVector indexVector;

    indexVector = new IntVector(elementNumber);
    for (int i = 0; i < elementNumber; i++) {
        indexVector.set(i, i);
    }

    return indexVector;
}

public int minIndex(long value) {
    IntVector lengthValVector;
    IntVector intMaskVector;
    IntVector indexVector;
    int       minIndex;

    // The indexVector is independent of <code>value</code> and can be
    // defined as a final attribute.
    indexVector = IntVector.indexVector(length());

    lengthValVector = new IntVector(length());
    lengthValVector.setAll(length());

    intMaskVector = new IntVector(length());
    intMaskVector.setAll(1, equal(value));

    minIndex = length() - lengthValVector.sub(indexVector).mul(intMaskVector).max();

    if (minIndex < length()) {
        return minIndex;
    } else {
        return -1;
    }
}

Best regrads,
Dietmar