[Python-Dev] Matrix product

[Cesare Di Mauro]

Nick Coghlan write:

> Sebastien Loisel wrote:
>> Dear Raymond,
>>
>> Thank you for your email.
>>
>>> I think much of this thread is a repeat of conversations
>>> that were held for PEP 225:
>>> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0225/
>>>
>>> That PEP is marked as deferred.  Maybe it's time to
>>> bring it back to life.
>>
>> This is a much better PEP than the one I had found, and would solve
>> all of the numpy problems. The PEP is very well thought-out.
>
> A very interesting read! I wouldn't support some of the more exotic
> elements tacked on to the end (particularly the replacement of the now
> thoroughly entrenched bitwise operators), but the basic idea of
> providing ~op variants of several operators seems fairly sound. I'd be
> somewhat inclined to add ~not, ~and and ~or to the list  even though
> that would pretty much force the semantics to be elementwise for the ~
> variants (since the standard not, and and or are always objectwise and
> without PEP 335 there's no way for an object to change that).
>
> Cheers,
> Nick.

I agree: adding ~op will be very interesting.

For example, we can easily provide case insensitive comparisons for string:

if foo ~== 'Spam':
  print "It's spam!'

equivalent to:

if foo.upper() == 'SPAM:
  print "It's spam!'

we can save both CPU time and memory to build
a brand new string that will be discarded after the comparison...

It will be also useful to redefine /, // and ** operators to do some common operations:

'spam, egg' / ', '  could be equivalent to iter('spam, egg'.split(', ')) # Generates an iterator

'spam, egg' // ', '  could be equivalent to 'spam, egg'.split(', ') # Generates a list

and ', ' ** ('spam', 'egg') could be equivalent to ', '.join(('spam', 'egg'))

but unfortunately we know that at the moment buil-in types
cannot be "extended" through "monkey patching"...

Cesare