2008/4/29 Alan G Isaac aisaac@american.edu:
As I was looking at Bill's conjugate gradient posting, I found myself wondering if there would be a payoff to an output argument for ``numpy.outer``. (It is fairly natural to repeatedly recreate the outer product of the adjusted residuals, which is only needed during a single iteration.)
I avoid np.outer, as it seems designed for foot shooting. (It forcibly flattens both arguments into vectors no matter what shape they are and then computes their outer product.) np.multiply.outer does (what I consider to be) the right thing. Not that it takes an output argument either, as far as I can tell.
But trying to inspect it suggests a few questions:
* Why are ufunc docstrings totally useless? * Why are output arguments not keyword arguments?
As for your original question, yes, I think it would be good if .outer() and .reduce() methods of ufuncs took output arguments. This would let one use add.reduce() as a poor man's sum() even when dealing with uint8s, for example. (Coming up with a problem for which subtract.reduce(), divide.reduce(), or arctan2.reduce() are the solutions is left as an exercise for the reader.) I can definitely see a use for divide.outer() : Int -> Int -> Float, though.
Anne