Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
- There might be some speed argument, if people often write things like "Mat @ Mat @ vec"? But no-one has found any evidence that people actually do write such things often.
With left associativity, this would be an algorithmic optimization: Mat @ (Mat @ vec) Mat @ (Mat @ (Mat @ vec)) On the other hand, this vec.T @ Mat @ Mat would not need parentheses for optimisation when the associativity is left. With right associativity, we get the same optimisation problem as well: (vec.T @ Mat) @ Mat ((vec.T @ Mat) @ Mat) @ Mat Personally I believe this advice to the novice programmer belongs in the documentation. If we just include it in the NumPy documentation, it will not be a problem. Advices about how to optimize numerical expressions should not be special cases in the syntax, in my opinion. That just makes the Python language harder to learn. Rather, it is a documentation problem for NumPy. We should write the NumPy documentation for @ such that the novice programmer easily understands the computational complexities of linear algebra operations. The PEP might include this as well, so the knowledge propagates into the rest of the Python language litterature, not just the NumPy docs. By the way, the * operator for np.matrix and Matlab matrices are left associative as well. This does not produce any problems. Sturla