On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 5:41 PM, Stephan Hoyer <shoyer@gmail.com> wrote:
If possible, I'd love to add new functions for "generalized ufunc" linear algebra, and then deprecate (or at least discourage) using the older versions with inferior broadcasting rules. Adding a new keyword arg means we'll be stuck with an awkward API for a long time to come.
There are three types of matrix/vector products for which ufuncs would be nice: 1. matrix-matrix product (covered by matmul) 2. matrix-vector product 3. vector-vector (inner) product
It's straightful to implement either of the later two options by inserting dummy dimensions and then calling matmul, but that's a pretty awkward API, especially for inner products. Unfortunately, we already use the two most obvious one word names for vector inner products (inner and dot). But on the other hand, one word names are not very descriptive, and the short name "dot" probably mostly exists because of the lack of an infix operator.
So I'll start by throwing out some potential new names:
For matrix-vector products: matvecmul (if it's worth making a new operator)
For inner products: vecmul (similar to matmul, but probably too ambiguous) dot_product inner_prod inner_product
Given how core to linear algebra these are, and that this is a family of somewhat expert-oriented functions, I think it'd even be fine to leave the "product" part implicit, like: np.linalg.matrix_matrix np.linalg.matrix_vector np.linalg.vector_matrix np.linalg.vector_vector np.linalg.vector_matrix_vector (for bilinear forms) (or we could shorten matrix -> mat, vector -> vec if we must.) -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org