Matlab vs Python (was RE: Discussion: Introducing new operators f

[paul at prescod.net.bbs]

Charles Boncelet wrote:
>
> ...
>
> This I must object to.  Linear algebra often involves big objects.
> These operations want to call a carefully written C function.  Any
> time you use Python to loop over matrix objects, you are dead in
> a big problem.  As far as I understand (and I could be wrong)
> neither list comprehensions nor the elementwise approach would be
> able to call the underlying C functions without python loops.

You are wrong about the .Element or .Element() approach. It is just a
syntactic approach, not a new computational model. .Element returns an
object that knows to use element-wise multiplication instead of
matrix-wise multiplcation. I thought it was a pretty elegant,
lightweight solution.
--
 Paul Prescod - Not encumbered by corporate consensus
It's difficult to extract sense from strings, but they're the only
communication coin we can count on.
	- http://www.cs.yale.edu/~perlis-alan/quotes.html