[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] reduce methods

Konrad Hinsen hinsen@ibs.ibs.fr
Fri, 31 Jan 1997 09:55:58 +0100


> I think Janko was trying to support my assertion that the mean (or max or
> min) of a 2-dimensional array with axis set to 1 should be a column vector.

There's the problem for people used to Matlab: There are no "row
vectors" and "column vectors" in the Python array system.  Arrays can
have any rank, and vectors have rank 1. Matlab treats everything as a
matrix (rank 2), with row and column vectors being just special kinds
of matrices.

Personally I have always found the MatLab way of doing things
unnecessarily complicated, but of course you may disagree ;-)
If there is sufficient interest in having Python equivalents
of the Matlab approach, my suggestion is to define such operations
on the class Matrix, and not to mix it up with the standard array
operations.
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Konrad Hinsen                          | E-Mail: hinsen@ibs.ibs.fr
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