[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] default axes

Carlos Fonseca Carlos Fonseca <fonseca@gaivota.demon.co.uk>
Fri, 16 Aug 1996 19:31:16 +0100 (BST)


On Fri, 16 Aug 1996, Konrad HINSEN wrote:
> > I really think dot(a,b) should behave _exactly_ like
> > 
> > add.reduce(a*b,axis=-1)
> 
> Why?

Perhaps I should have put it a different way:

I would like the functionality of add.reduce(a*b,axis=-1), but without the
need to allocate memory to store a*b, to be available. Why, because it
appears to be as simple and general as it can get. I also thought that the
name dot() would fit this description, but looking at the definition of
dot() in Numeric.py, perhaps this functionality should simply be provided
by multiarray.innerproduct() 

> > Full rank multiplication of two arrays could be written:
> > 
> > dot(a[...,(n-1)*(NewAxis,)],b,axes=-n)

[ actually, it should be dot(a[(Ellipses,)+(n-1)*(NewAxis,)],b,axes=-n) ]
> 
> That is a lot too complicated for a frequent operation, especially
> considering that n might not be available as a variable or constant,
> i.e. it would have to be written as shape(b)[0].

I agree, and this is why I wrote further down in the same post that I
agreed with the idea of writing two functions. innerproduct(a,b,axis) as
add.reduce(a*b,axis) provides all the functionality that is needed to
write dot() for general matrix multiplication.

Carlos




=================
MATRIX-SIG  - SIG on Matrix Math for Python

send messages to: matrix-sig@python.org
administrivia to: matrix-sig-request@python.org
=================