On Fri, 22 Oct 2004, Travis Oliphant apparently wrote:
The idea of r_ was to allow fast creation of arrays similar to what is available with MATLAB. I wanted a short, quick way to concatenate and generate arrays. For 1-d arrays, r_ and c_ are supposed to be exactly the same. It's only when you give them two dimensional arrays that they differ. Admittedly, I really like the one-dimensional array creation ability of r_ and I use it quite often. The two-dimensional array creation is not as good. bmat is intended to improve that some. I am open to any ideas about how to improve this. Perhaps, we just kill c_ and suggest something else (like an improved bmat) for building 2-d arrays quickly.
I find both r_ and c_ nice to have around. I would request a single change: that for 1-d arrays, one of them return transpose([x]) instead of x. (In my view, r_ should do this, but whatever.) fwiw, Alan