[Numpy-discussion] Getting 0.9.8 out this week

[Alan G Isaac]

On Tue, 09 May 2006, Tim Hochberg apparently wrote: 
> Perhaps you should write down a candidate description of 
> how axis should work for matrices. It would be best if you 
> could come up with something that looks internally self 
> consistent. At present axis=None means  returns 1x1 matrix 
> and there's a fairly self consistent story that we can 
> tell to explain this behaviour.

You mean that x.max(1).max(0) == m.max()
(which I take it is the new behavior)?

> I haven't seen a description for the alternative behaviour 
> other than it does one thing when axis is a number and 
> something very different when axis=None. That seems less 
> than ideal. 

OK, I agree.  There are several cases where there have been 
requests to return scalars instead of 1×1 matrices.
This is starting to look like that, and I do not want to 
take a stand on such questions.

But for context, the "principle" (such as it is) that I had 
in mind is essentially that axis=None is a request for an 
*element* of a matrix.

Cheers,
Alan Isaac