On Wed, 14 Nov 2018 at 17:29, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 8:57 AM Stephan Hoyer <shoyer@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> It recently came up on GitHub (at part of the discussion in https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/12379) that numpy.linspace could, at least in principle, be modified to support array inputs:
>>
>> It looks like this has been requested on StackOverflow, too:
>> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46694167/vectorized-numpy-linspace-across-multi-dimensional-arrays
>>
>> My tentative proposal:
>> - "start" and "stop" are broadcast against each other to form start/stop arrays. (Or we could require that start/stop have matching shape.)
>> - A new dimension of size "num" is inserted into the result, either along the first or last axis.
>> - A new keyword argument "axis" could control where the axis is inserted in the result.
>> - Vectorization support should be added in the same way to geomspace and logspace.
>>
>> Does this seem like a good idea? It's a relatively simple generalization, and one that I, at least, would find useful (I can think of a use-case in my own code that came up just last week).
>
>
> This feels a bit forced. There's not much relevance to the minor performance gain, and for code clarity it probably also wouldn't help (actually it hurts usability for 99.x% of use cases by making the doc more complicated). Not sure that it really would require a new axis argument, as Marten said on the issue. Also, the num keyword cannot be vectorized, unless one returns a list of arrays, which would actually be more natural here than a 2-D array.
>
> So, at best a don't care for me - I'm -0.5.

For what it's worth, I had a use case for this in the past week, when
I needed many simple linear interpolations between two values (thus a
linspace) with only the value of boundary points varying.  However,
this was the first time I've ever needed it, and I found a recipe on
Stack Overflow within minutes
(https://stackoverflow.com/a/42617889/974555) so it wasn't a big deal
that it wasn't available in core numpy.

Gerrit.

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