Discussion: new operators for numerical computation

[Tim Hochberg]

Robin Becker <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> writes:

> people keep talking about matrix operations as though there is only one
> way to do one kind of matrix multiply; I use at least two (inner, outer)
> commonly, but others eg Kronecker or Lie are certainly in use. I don't
> think any proposal which doesn't address this is likely to get my vote.

Well Konrad mentioned [x] or (x) which gives you a lot more symbolic
room. For instance one could use [x] for outer products since you can
take an outer "product" with essentially any operation. (*) would be
matrix multiply, (/) would be matrix "divide", we'd still be searching
for a solve operator though. (.) Could be some other inner product.

Although, there's a fair amount of "symbol" space in this kind of operator
scheme, but there's still an issue in that for dimensions greater than
two, there's no way to specify which axis to apply the inner products
on. I'm not sure there's any good way to do that with infix notation though.

Why don't you propose something that would fit your needs?

Rambling,

-tim