From: Konrad H. <hi...@cn...> - 2002-03-08 08:05:25
|
"Perry Greenfield" <pe...@st...> writes: > That still leaves the question of how to do the conversions, i.e., one > of the following options ... > I strongly prefer the first (functional) form. Me too. I wouldn't call it "functional" though, it's exactly the way object constructors are written. > Rick White has also convinced me that this alone isn't sufficient. > There are numerous occasions where people would like to use matrix > multiply, even in a predominately "array" context, enough so that this > would justify a special operator for matrix multiplication. If the Could you summarize those reasons please? I know that there are applications of matrix multiplication in array processing, but in my experience they are rare enough that writing dot(a, b) is not a major distraction. Maybe we need to take another step back as well: Python is a general-purpose language, with several specialized subcommunities such as ours, some of them even more important in size. Most likely they are having similar discussions. Perhaps the database guys are discussing why they need two more special operators for searching and concatenating databases. I don't think such requests are reasonable. It is tempting to think that it doesn't matter, if you don't need that operator, you just don't use it. But a big advantage of Python is readability. If we get our (well, *yours*, I don't want it ;-) matrix multiply operator, a month later someone will decide that it's just great for his database application, and the database community will have to get used to it as well. > Numeric community is united on this, I think Guido would be receptive. > We might suggest a particular operator symbol or pair (triple) but Actually I feel quite safe: there might be a majority for another operator, but I don't expect we'd ever agree on a symbol :-) Konrad. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Konrad Hinsen | E-Mail: hi...@cn... Centre de Biophysique Moleculaire (CNRS) | Tel.: +33-2.38.25.56.24 Rue Charles Sadron | Fax: +33-2.38.63.15.17 45071 Orleans Cedex 2 | Deutsch/Esperanto/English/ France | Nederlands/Francais ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |