Python 3.5 to Ship with Matrix Multiplication Operator

Re:Python 3.5 to Ship with Matrix Multiplication Operator by CamperBob2 on Tuesday April 08, 2014 @01:33PM (#7554815)

Here's my uneducated guess: the Python maintainers see NumPy as a bit of a killer app, and the NumPy maintainers would like to be a MATLAB killer. The entire MATLAB language is designed to make life easier when dealing with matrices (people think it stands for MATh LAB but it actually stands for MATrix LAB.)

MATLAB went down the matrix rabbit hole so far, they made ordinary scalars second-class types. If you want to multiply scalars or otherwise do element-wise operations, you have to prefix the '*' operator with a '.'. If Python can make their language more linear-algebra friendly while avoiding that sort of silliness, I'm all for it.

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Re:Python 3.5 to Ship with Matrix Multiplication Operator by GFK_of_xmaspast on Tuesday April 08, 2014 @05:15PM (#7556067)

"""If you want to multiply scalars or otherwise do element-wise operations, you have to prefix the '*' operator with a '.'. """

what???

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Re:Python 3.5 to Ship with Matrix Multiplication Operator by quux on Tuesday April 08, 2014 @05:39PM (#7556194)

You don't have to use .* and friends when operating in 2 scalers, 2 * 3 works just fine. But if you have 2 matrices A and B, A * B does a matrix multiplication, And A .* B is needed for element wise multiplication.

I'm still new to matlab, but the place where this has bitten me is if I'm trying to write code that works on either a scalar or vector of scAlars, if you aren't specific, the code my run fine against a single scalar, but blow up or do the wrong thing with a vector.

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