[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] Let's get going

[Jim Fulton, U.S. Geological Survey]

On Wed, 13 Sep 1995 14:07:22 -0400 
Hinsen Konrad said:
> 
>    3) Whenever a slice is passed to a function requiring a matrix argument,  
>    automatically copy the data from the slice to a contiguous block of memory.   
>    Allow slices to be used in numeric operations, doing this efficiently where  
>    possible, and copying the slice to a contiguous block of memeory where not  
>    possible.  This would be the most efficient solution.
> 
> Why would it have to be copied whenever it is passed to a function?
> It would be sufficient to make a copy whenever the matrix is
> changed.

This gets back to my earlier comment that slices, as proposed cannot
be matrices because they store a reference to the data from which they
were created and a bunch of offsets for accessing the orinal data
properly.  When passed to math/sci libraries, they'll have to be
converted to real matrices so that their data are contiguous.

JIm

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