Renaming the sparse matrix functions should absolutely be done. And this is
coming from a long-time former user of Matlab who works with sparse
matrices much more often than I work with strings. SparseMatrixCSC is far
from the only sparse matrix format in the world when you venture beyond
what Matlab provides. A major shortcoming of spzeros, sprandn, etc is they
are not at all generic or extensible in the output format. We should
eventually use zeros(SparseMatrixCSC, ...) or something to that effect, and
we can easily put deprecations in place for the current Matlab-heritage
names. What will be somewhat challenging is figuring out how to coordinate
this kind of restructuring along with the existing dense version of zeros,
randn, etc - since these currently take an element type as an input and
always output as a dense Array{eltype, N}. Since generally the container
types already have their element types as a parameter, I think it would be
more general to move towards asking for the complete container type of the
output in functions like zeros, rather than asking for the element type.
On Monday, April 27, 2015 at 2:03:17 PM UTC-7, Jiahao Chen wrote:
>
> For sparse matrix functions, Matlab's nomenclature is the de facto
> standard, since providing a high level interface to sparse matrices is a
> Matlab innovation. Renaming these functions can be considered, but will
> doubtless offend the sensibilities of those accustomed to other languages.
>
