On Sun, Jun 5, 2016 at 5:41 PM, Stephan Hoyer <sho...@gmail.com> wrote: > If possible, I'd love to add new functions for "generalized ufunc" linear > algebra, and then deprecate (or at least discourage) using the older > versions with inferior broadcasting rules. Adding a new keyword arg means > we'll be stuck with an awkward API for a long time to come. > > There are three types of matrix/vector products for which ufuncs would be > nice: > 1. matrix-matrix product (covered by matmul) > 2. matrix-vector product > 3. vector-vector (inner) product > > It's straightful to implement either of the later two options by inserting > dummy dimensions and then calling matmul, but that's a pretty awkward API, > especially for inner products. Unfortunately, we already use the two most > obvious one word names for vector inner products (inner and dot). But on the > other hand, one word names are not very descriptive, and the short name > "dot" probably mostly exists because of the lack of an infix operator. > > So I'll start by throwing out some potential new names: > > For matrix-vector products: > matvecmul (if it's worth making a new operator) > > For inner products: > vecmul (similar to matmul, but probably too ambiguous) > dot_product > inner_prod > inner_product
Given how core to linear algebra these are, and that this is a family of somewhat expert-oriented functions, I think it'd even be fine to leave the "product" part implicit, like: np.linalg.matrix_matrix np.linalg.matrix_vector np.linalg.vector_matrix np.linalg.vector_vector np.linalg.vector_matrix_vector (for bilinear forms) (or we could shorten matrix -> mat, vector -> vec if we must.) -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org https://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
