On Tuesday, 13 March 2018 at 21:04:28 UTC, bachmeier wrote:
What I have settled on is Row(x,2), which returns a range that
works with foreach. I tried x[_,2] to return Row(x,2) but
didn't like reading it, so I went with x[_all,2] instead.
Similarly for Col(x,2) and x[2,_all]. The exact form is
bikeshedding and shouldn't make much difference. I use ByRow(x)
and ByColumn(x) to iterate over the full matrix.
This Row(x, 2) is essentially the same approach as Armadillo (it
also has rows, cols, span). mir's select isn't quite the same
thing.
_all is interesting.
mir's byDim that can iterate by both rows and columns.
IME, if you try to mix row-order and column-order, or 0-based
indexing and 1-based indexing, it's too complicated to write
correct code that interacts with other libraries. I think you
need to choose one and go with it.
Fair enough.
mir uses a row-order 0-based indexing approach by default. That's
fine, I'm used to it at this point. What I was thinking about was
that Slice's definition would change from
struct Slice(SliceKind kind, size_t[] packs, Iterator) to
struct Slice(SliceKind kind, size_t[] packs, Iterator,
MemoryLayout layout = rowLayout)
so that the user has control over changing it on a object by
object basis. Ideally, they would keep it the same across the
entire program. Nevertheless, I would still prefer it so that all
functions in mir provide the same result regardless of what
layout is chosen (not sure you can say that about switching to
0-based indexing...). The idea would be that whatever is built on
top of it shouldn't need to care about the layout. However, due
to cache locality, some programs might run faster depending on
the layout chosen.
With respect to interacting with libraries, I agree that a user
should choose either row-order or column-order and stick to it.
But what options are available for the user of a column-major
language (or array library) to call mir if mir only makes
available functions that handle row-major layouts? RCppArmadillo
doesn't have an issue because both R and Armadillo are
column-major. Going the other way, you'd probably know better
than I would, but it looks like in embedr the only way I see to
assign a D matrix to a RMatrix is by copying values. If a matrix
was already in column-major form, then how easy much easier would
it be to interact with R?
