[SciPy-user] change in matrix behavior

Anne Archibald peridot.faceted at gmail.com
Thu May 8 15:57:29 EDT 2008


2008/5/8 Nathan Bell <wnbell at gmail.com>:

>  I just don't see any argument for making matrices more like arrays
>  that doesn't logically conclude with eliminating matrices altogether.
>  The "artifact" of matrices that was recently eliminated was, IMO, one
>  of the only reasons for them to exist.

Well, the primary (only?) reason for matrices to exist is the
multiplication operator. That was unaffected by the current change. I
would say that most of the people in the discussion thought that
matrices should behave as much like arrays as possible, with the sole
difference being the * and ** operators.

Of course, I use arrays instead of matrices, so I'm not particularly
aware of any more subtle conveniences they offer. Perhaps you could
contribute some use cases that demonstrate the utility of the very
surprising old scalar indexing behaviour?

Anne



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