[SciPy-user] Matrix docs?

[Skip Montanaro]

I'm the "Python guy" at work, not a scientific programmer.  I'm trying to
help our researchers start using Python and SciPy (they are used to R,
Matlab and SPlus).  We're all having trouble finding useful documentation
for extremely basic stuff.  There's a mat() function that returns a Matrix
object, but I can't find any documentation on this Matrix object.  The only
example I have of mat() usage is in the SciPy tutorial and it appears to use
some weird string form as input:

    mat('[1 3 5; 2 5 1; 2 3 8]')

I thought, "surely there must be some way to create a Matrix from a list of
lists?"  The obvious experiment works:

    mat([[1, 3, 5], [2, 5, 1], [2, 3, 8]])

but it seems odd to me that this isn't the form shown in the tutorial.

My feeble attempts to find something come up empty:

    http://oliphant.ee.byu.edu:81/scipy_base/mat
    http://www.scipy.org/documentation/apidocs/scipy/scipy.linalg.matfuncs.html

    >>> info(mat)
     Matrix(data, typecode=None, copy=1, savespace=0)

    None

I eventually stumbled on the NumPy docs.  It has an array, and I then
noticed that the scipy package exports an array() function, which at first
glance seems to be about the same as mat().  What's the difference between
mat() and array()?

Is there some more cohesive documentation?

Thanks,

-- 
Skip Montanaro
skip at pobox.com