2009/6/8 Christopher Barker <Chris.Barker@noaa.gov>

Olivier Verdier wrote:
> One
> should realize that allowing dot(A,B,C) is just *better* than the
> present situation where the user is forced into writing dot(dot(A,B),C)
> or dot(A,dot(B,C)).

I'm lost now -- how is this better in any significant way?

Well, allowing dot(A,B,C) does not remove any other possibility does it? That is what I meant by "better". It just gives the user an extra possibility. What would be wrong with that? Especially since matrix users already can write A*B*C.

I won't fight for this though. I personally don't care but I think that it would remove the last argument for matrices against arrays, namely the fact that A*B*C is easier to write than dot(dot(A,B),C). I don't understand why it would be a bad idea to implement this dot(A,B,C).

Tom K. wrote:
> But,
> almost all experienced users drift away from matrix toward array as they
> find the matrix class too limiting or strange

That's one reason, and the other is that when you are doing real work,
it is very rare for the linear algebra portion to be significant. I know
in my code (and this was true when I was using MATLAB too), I may have
100 lines of code, and one of them is a linear algebra expression that
could be expressed nicely with matrices and infix operators. Given that
the rest of the code is more natural with nd-arrays, why the heck would
I want to use matrices? this drove me crazy with MATLAB -- I hated the
default matrix operators, I was always typing ".*", etc.

This exactly agrees with my experience too.

== Olivier