[Python-Dev] Matrix product

[Fernando Perez]

Guido van Rossum wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 25, 2008 at 6:50 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz>
> wrote:
>> Sebastien Loisel wrote:
>>
>>> What are the odds of this thing going in?
>>
>> I don't know. Guido has said nothing about it so far this
>> time round, and his is the only opinion that matters in the
>> end.
> 
> I'd rather stay silent until a PEP exists, but I should point out that
> last time '@' was considered as a new operator, that character had no
> uses in the language at all. Now it is the decorator marker. Therefore
> it may not be so attractive any more.

Others have indicated already how pep 225 seems to be the best current summary of this issue.  Here's a concrete proposal:  the SciPy conference, where a lot of people with a direct stake on this mattter will be present, will be held very soon (August 19-24 at Caltech):

http://conference.scipy.org/

I am hereby volunteering to try to organize a BOF session at the conference on this topic, and can come back later with the summary.  I'm also scheduled to give a talk at BayPiggies on Numpy/Scipy soon after the conference, so that may be a good opportunity to have some further discussions in person with some of you.

It's probably worth noting that python is *really* growing in the scientific world.  A few weeks ago I ran a session on Python for science at the annual SIAM conference (the largest applied math conference in the country), with remarkable success:

http://fdoperez.blogspot.com/2008/07/python-tools-for-science-go-to-siam.html

(punchline: we were selected for the annual highlights - http://www.ams.org/ams/siam-2008.html#python).

This is just to show that python really matters to scientific users, and its impact is growing rapidly, as the tools mature and we reach critical mass so the network effects kick in.  It would be great to see this topic considered for the language in the 2.7/3.1 timeframe, and I'm willing to help with some of the legwork.

So if this idea sounds agreeable to python-dev, I'd need to know whether I should propose the BOF using pep 225 as a starting point, or if there are any other considerations on the matter I should be aware of (I've read this thread in full, but I just want to start on track since the BOF is a one-shot event).  I'll obviously post this on the numpy/scipy mailing lists so those not coming to the conference can participate, but an all-hands BOF is an excellent opportunity to collect feedback and ideas from the community that is likely to care most about this feature.

Thanks,

f