Re: [Numpy-discussion] design issues - octave 'incompatibilities'

[Soeren S. <pyt...@nn...>]

On Sat, 2005-07-23 at 12:06 -0700, Robert Kern wrote:
> Soeren Sonnenburg wrote:
> > Dear all,
> > 
> > I am new to numarray and as I am trying to use it day-by-day
> > I am now wondering about certain numeric/numarray design issues. Please
> > forgive me / correct me as I probably misunderstood certain issues.
> > 
> > -- Why did you choose row-major instead of column major format as
> > practiced by R/octave/matlab... Doesn't that mean performance problems
> > as fortran/blas is optimized if you work with the transposed version ?
> 
> Not everyone is interfacing with optimized FORTRAN code. Those who are 
> are usually using ATLAS as their BLAS, and ATLAS has row-major versions 
> of the BLAS subroutines. Row-major is C's convention and 
> numarray/Numeric largely follow that. There are of course some 
> performance issues when interfacing with FORTRAN code that expects 
> column-major, but there would be other performance problems if 
> numarray/Numeric were column-major and interfacing with row-major code.

Well but why did you change to the C version then ? Well maybe if it is
about optimizing stuff seriously one could work with the transpose
anyway...

> Often, though, a "row" vector can also be used in place of a "column" 
> vector. Although sometimes not:

You are right, thanks!

> > Are there more elegant ways to do this ? Which issues are likely to be
> > fixed in the future ?
> 
> None. They're not broken, just different from what you are used to.

Thanks a lot for your very helpful mail!

Do you know whether mixing slices and arrays will be supported at some
point a[:,[0,1]] ?

Soeren.