Bart et al:
In keeping with Larry's design philosophy that the language should "not just
sit there -do something!" I agree that there should be a number of
vector/matrix manipulations available, performed in a psuedo-scalar context
(not in a loop). Just to name a few:
arithmetic ops +-*/
ceiling, floor
rank
reshape / matrix transposition
vector generators (generate an array of integers 1..100)
inner/outer product
polynomial expansion
and / or reduction
sigma function
mathmatical functions for multiple vectors such as (@x) + (@y) (in a
non-scalar sense)
etc. etc. This kind of functionality would attract a whole new category of
users from mathematics and other areas, as well as giving us optimized
solutions to operations that many of us do regularly in loop contexts.
On the other hand one can argue all of these belong in CPAN under a matrix::
library or something like that, but to me if would make Perl a powertool to
build these kinds of functions into the language syntax. In many cases these
can be treated as overloading scalar ops for a non-scalar context.
Ed
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