On Sat, Jan 9, 2010 at 9:52 AM, <[email protected]> wrote:

> A small technical note about indexing.  While M[1][1] works (i.e., it gives
> you the entry), M[1,1] is much, much more powerful.  For example, M[1,
> (1,2)] gives you a submatrix, M[1,:] gives you row 1; M[:, 1] gives you
> column 1, etc.  It's even more powerful than that, because you can easily do
> operations involving submatrices.  For example,
>
> M[:, (0,1)] = M[:, (1,0)]
>
> swaps columns 0 and 1.  Do you see what is happening here?


This is excellent!  Thanks very much.  And very timely - it will be perfect
for illustrating things coming up, like expansion by minors.






>  The right hand side is giving you a matrix consisting of columns 1 and 0
> (in that order).  You are assigning those to whatever is on the left side of
> the equals, which is a placeholder for columns 0 and 1 (in that order).  So
> you've swapped the columns!  You can't do this sort of thing with the
> M[][]-type indexing.
>
> Also, M[:, -1] gives you the last column.
>
> For documentation, see M.__getitem__? and M.__setitem__?
>
> We should make the indexing stuff examples in the reference manual (I don't
> believe it's there now since it's for a "__" function). I've made
> http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7877 to address this problem.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Jason
>
>
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-- 
"Computer science is the new mathematics."

-- Dr. Christos Papadimitriou
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