On Apr 28, 2010, at 11:19 AM, Robert Kern wrote: > On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 11:05, Travis Oliphant > <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Apr 26, 2010, at 7:19 PM, David Warde-Farley wrote: >> >>> Trying to debug code written by an undergrad working for a colleague >>> of >>> mine who ported code over from MATLAB, I am seeing an ugly melange >>> of >>> matrix objects and ndarrays that are interacting poorly with each >>> other >>> and various functions in SciPy/other libraries. In particular there >>> was >>> a custom minimizer function that contained a line "a * b", that was >>> receiving an Nx1 "matrix" and a N-length array and computing an >>> outer >>> product. Hence the unexpected 6 GB of memory usage and weird >>> results... >> >> Overloading '*' and '**' while convenient does have consequences. >> It >> would be nice if we could have a few more infix operators in Python >> to >> allow separation of element-by-element calculations and "dot- >> product" >> calculations. >> >> A proposal was made to allow "calling a NumPy array" to infer dot >> product: >> >> a(b) is equivalent to dot(a,b) >> >> a(b)(c) would be equivalent to dot(dot(a,b),c) >> >> This seems rather reasonable. >> >> >> While I don't have any spare cycles to push it forward and we are >> already far along on the NumPy to 3.0, I had wondered if we couldn't >> use the leverage of Python core developers wanting NumPy to be ported >> to Python 3 to actually add a few more infix operators to the >> language. >> >> One of the problems of moving to Python 3.0 for many people is that >> there are not "new features" to outweigh the hassle of moving. >> Having a few more infix operators would be a huge incentive to the >> NumPy community to move to Python 3. >> >> Anybody willing to lead the charge with the Python developers? > > There is currently a moratorium on language changes. This will have > to wait.
Exceptions can always be made for the right reasons. I don't think this particular question has received sufficient audience with Python core developers. The reason they want the moratorium is for stability, but they also want Python 3k to be adopted. -Travis _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list [email protected] http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
