Apologies in advance if this is something that has been discussed at length already, I wasn't able to find it.
In Julia 0.5, if A is a 5x5 matrix, the behavior of A[1,:] will be changed to return a 5-element array instead of a 1x5 array. However, at least in the current build, sum(A,1) still gives a 1x5 array as it does in earlier versions, and similarly for other array reductions like mean, maximum, etc. I understand that these functions and slicing are fundamentally different things, but I find this a little counter intuitive (at the very least different from numpy's behavior). I often find myself interested in quantities such as A[1,:] ./ mean(A,1) (the first row of a matrix normalized by the average of each column's entries). In 0.5, this gives something quite different from what I'm expecting (in fact it gives a 5x5 matrix). So my questions are: Is there a discussion of the rationale behind doing things this way? Is this something that may be changed in the future? If not, is there an alternative to the standard sum, mean, etc. functions that is recommended for this? Just a liberal use of squeeze()?
