On Sun, Feb 18, 2007 at 01:10:53PM -0500, Neal Becker wrote:

I have never used matlab, but a lot of my colleagues do. Can anyone give me some good references that I could show them to explain the advantages of python over matlab?

http://www.scipy.org/NumPyProConPage http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.scientific.user/8950 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/browse_frm/thread/a71af37fd9... -- Mike

"Barry Wark" writes:

Yes, I agree. I wasn't coming at so much from the goal of making Pylab a Matlab clone (as you point out, that's silly, and misses much of the advantage of Python), but rather from the goal of making interactive use as efficient as possible. When I fire up ipython -pylab to do some quick exploration, it's nice not to have to type N.blah or pylab.plot

IMHO the greatest strength of Matlab in interactive use is the matrix input format. For one thing, it is easier to type something like [0 1 0; 1 0 0; 0 0 1] than array([[0,1,0],[1,0,0],[0,0,1]]) Granted, you can often leave out the array() wrapper, but typing all the commas and brackets and getting the nesting right slows me down enough that using Python feels like tedious work where Matlab is more like an Emacs-like extension of the mind. Another neat feature is auto-flattening: to e.g. add row- and column-wise sums and a grand total to a matrix M, you can type [M sum(M,2); sum(M,1) sum(M(:))] compared to which the r_[] and c_[] syntax feels like an ugly hack. (Of course, the auto-flattening feature is a disaster for serious programming (as opposed to quick interactive work), so Matlab has added cell arrays which don't auto-flatten, leading to no end of confusion between [] and {} indexing and the need to add {:} in seemingly random spots in Matlab code.) I suppose these things could be addressed quite neatly by IPython. It could even modify your history similarly to what it currently does with the %magic commands, so that when you type a = [0 1 0; 1 0 0; 0 0 1] and then examine your history, you see a = array([[0,1,0],[1,0,0],[0,0,1]]) which you could copy-paste into the program you are developing. Perhaps the namespace issue could also be addressed at the IPython level. The pylab profile could import the various packages, perhaps with some kind of abbreviated names, and rewrite commands like a = array(...) plot(sin(a)) to a = numpy.array(...) pylab.plot(numpy.sin(a)) so again you could copy/paste from the history to an editor and get correctly Pythonic code without any "from ... import *". Probably a 100% solution is quite difficult because of the dynamic features in Python, but it seems to me that a 80% solution should be feasible. (Parse the input to an AST using the parser facility in the Python library, use a tree walker to find all references to functions or variables, and if they don't exist in locals() or globals() and are not the target of an assignment anywhere in the AST, replace them by references to the appropriate package.) -- Jouni K. Seppänen http://www.iki.fi/jks

On Sun, 25 Feb 2007, Jouni K. Seppänen apparently wrote:

it is easier to type something like [0 1 0; 1 0 0; 0 0 1] than array([[0,1,0],[1,0,0],[0,0,1]])

x = numpy.mat('0 1 0; 1 0 0; 0 0 1').A hth, Alan Isaac

To get back to the original subject of the thread, there has been a commit today on the docutils plugins branch that allows folks to write their own parser/writer and somehow include it in docutils, without having to rebuild docutils. In other words, NumPy could define a plugin, and if docutils is installed, link the plugin to the docutils installation. This would allow third party package that use docutils to process numpy docstrings using the plugin. I don't know how far we can disgress from the reST syntax using those plugins, but it's probably something worth looking at. Check out: svn://svn.berlios.de/docutils/branches/plugins and the info about the plugin hookup is in docs/howto/extensions.txt David 2007/2/27, Alexandre Fayolle :

On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 06:44:37PM +0200, Jouni K. Seppänen wrote:

...

"Barry Wark" writes:

...

Yes, I agree. I wasn't coming at so much from the goal of making Pylab a Matlab clone (as you point out, that's silly, and misses much of the advantage of Python), but rather from the goal of making interactive use as efficient as possible. When I fire up ipython -pylab to do some quick exploration, it's nice not to have to type N.blah or pylab.plot

IMHO the greatest strength of Matlab in interactive use is the matrix input format. For one thing, it is easier to type something like

[0 1 0; 1 0 0; 0 0 1]

than

array([[0,1,0],[1,0,0],[0,0,1]])

A very nice shortcut in my opinion is the one supported by the HP scientific calculators (HP28, HP48 in my days), which would look like:

array([[0,1,0], 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1])

I'm not quite sure how this could be generalized nicely for arbitrary shapes, but for arrays of rank 2 (which are a very common case where people are actually typing the values) it feels nice (especially on a french keyboard where the square brackets are awkward to type in)

-- Alexandre Fayolle LOGILAB, Paris (France) Formations Python, Zope, Plone, Debian: http://www.logilab.fr/formations Développement logiciel sur mesure: http://www.logilab.fr/services Informatique scientifique: http://www.logilab.fr/science Reprise et maintenance de sites CPS: http://www.migration-cms.com/

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