[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] Final (hopefully) alpha release available

[Jim Hugunin]

> > Why is the imaginary component of a matrix M M.imaginary while that of
> > a complex number Z is Z.imag. There have been several simple functions
> > that I've writen that wouldn't have cared whether they were dealing
> > with matrices or numbers except for this. 
> > 
> > Am I missing something obvious here...?

Konrad wrote the complex number object and I wrote the array object and we
clearly got our signals crossed.  When designing this system we more or
less agreed on the use of no abbreviations in the naming conventions.  The
only exception to this that I'm aware of is the trig functions "sin",
"tan", "arcsin", etc. where the abbreviations are used almost universally.

I'd personally reccommend that we try and convince Guido to change the
complex number attributes to Z.imaginary in order to maintain this
consistent avoidence of abbreviations.  If he is unwilling to make this
change this soon before the 1.4 final release, then I'll change the array
objects for consistency.  Any objections?

On a similar note, Konrad has been suggesting for quite some time that
there should be ufuncs for real, imaginary and conjugate.  The advantage to
these functions is that they'd work on floats as expected, and they could
also work on user defined types.  I'll probably find time to add them
before the beta release.

-Jim

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

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