Discussion: new operators for numerical computation

[Perry Greenfield]

We are planning to use Numeric (or its future equivalent) heavily for
our software. One thing we would strongly object to is making 
matrix operators the default. The vast majority of our manipulations 
(on images and spectra) involve elementwise operations. This would be
consistent with what most astronomers would expect (and how IDL--currently
the most commonly used array-based language in the astronomical community 
by far--handles it).

Use of parentheses for matrix operators that Konrad Hinsen proposed
appears to be the best solution I've seen so far. But perhaps the two
camps won't be able to agree which should be the default, in which case
there should be two different modules based on the same Numeric core with
different operator mappings previously suggested. I don't necessarily see
that a lack of agreement on this issue should prevent adding the new
operators to Python as long as everyone agrees with the operator syntax.
But adopting one scheme (ours of course :-) would certainly be best.

Perry Greenfield