Not worth describing my workaround, it was actually based on a misunderstanding of closures on my part and entirely unneeded.
From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Tony Kelman Sent: Friday, May 8, 2015 6:57 PM To: [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: [julia-users] Re: scipy min_cg example This comes up pretty often with Optim as well, making a closure works fine when you're only solving a single problem with a single set of parameters, but it's a little cumbersome when you have a small set of parameter values that you're trying to loop over many times. David, can you give a sketch of the funky workaround you were using here? You wound up creating a one-element array that you were using to transmit the index into the parameter data vector into the inner-loop function, or something like that, right? On Friday, May 8, 2015 at 11:49:48 AM UTC-7, Steven G. Johnson wrote: Here is the example from the SciPy manual, translated into working Julia code: @pyimport scipy.optimize as so using PyCall args = (2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10) function fun(x, args...) u, v = x a, b, c, d, e, f = args return a*u^2 + b*u*v + c*v^2 + d*u + e*v + f end function gradf(x, args...) u, v = x a, b, c, d, e, f = args gu = 2*a*u + b*v + d # u-component of the gradient gv = b*u + 2*c*v + e # v-component of the gradient return [gu, gv] end x0 = [0, 0] so.fmin_cg(fun, x0, fprime=gradf, args=args) I copied their style, but it would have been cleaner to write e.g. function fun(x, a, b, c, d, e, f) u, v = x return a*u^2 + b*u*v + c*v^2 + d*u + e*v + f end rather than using varargs. Of course, it would be cleaner to omit the whole "args" nonsense to begin with, and just write: so.fmin_cg(x -> fun2(x, a, b, c, d, e, f), x0, fprime= x -> gradf(x, a, b, c, d, e, f)) since, as I mentioned above, their "args" is just a clumsy workaround for lexical scoping, which both Python and Julia already have.
