On Wed, 16 Apr 2008, Anne Archibald apparently wrote: > My (draconian) suggestion would be to simply raise an > exception when a matrix is indexed with a scalar.
This has been suggested before. But then, why? Again, this imposes a deviation from the behavior of arrays that provides no gain in functionality. My proposal is: deviate from array behavior only when it gives a clear gain in functionality. > They're inherently two-dimensional; Of course. But the question is what follows from this as an implication for the behavior of 1d indexing and iteration. The answer is: nothing! We get to do whatever is most useful! > if you want a submatrix you should provide both indices > (possibly including a ":"). Yes. We exactly agree on this. Please persuade Stefan. > If you actually want a subarray, as with an array, use > ".A". Again we agree on this. But none of this answers the question: what should you get when you iterate over a matrix. Stefan seems to agree with me to this extent: we should get its "rows". This disagreement is over what that means: are these submatrices, a new vector object, or 1d arrays? I claim that if you use matrices, you will find it natural for these to be 1d arrays. > That said, I don't actually use matrices, so I don't get a vote. As far as I know, no objections have been raised by users of matrices. In this sense, the objections have all been "abstract": they do not reflect experience with the implied convenience or inconvenience or particular behaviors. Cheers, Alan Isaac _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
