On 3/24/07, Anne Archibald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 24/03/07, Bill Baxter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Nice, but how does that fare on things like mdot(a,(b,c),d) ? I'm
> > pretty sure it doesn't handle it.
> > I think an mdot that can only multiply things left to right comes up
> > short compared to an infix operator that can easily use parentheses to
> > control order.
>
> Well, since exact dotting is associative, the parenthesization doesn't
> matter there; if you're worried about roundoff or efficiency, you're
> going to have to be more explicit.
Yes performance was the thing I was thinking about. You often know a
little something about the sizes of your inputs that can help make
things more efficient. Like
BigMatrix1 * BigMatrix2 * LittleVector
Is much faster to calculate as
BigMatrix1 * (BigMatrix2 * LittleVector)
than
(BigMatrix1 * BigMatrix2) * LittleVector
> Unfortunately your approach requires tuples to be treated differently from
> arrays.
Yeh, that was a conscious decision (which I noted in the docstring).
You are right that it is different from what Numpy normally does,
which is one reason I didn't say "lets replace dot with this
function".
> Most functions
> in numpy will happily treat a tuple of length n, a list of length n,
> and an array of length n the same way.
Yep, it's nice in general. But in practice I very rarely do math on
tuples. The only thing I can think of is I used to do prod(arr.shape)
before I realized that arr.size give the same thing. I'm positive
I've never used dot on tuples.
> You could do this, and for your
> own code maybe it's worth it, but I think it would be confusing in the
> library.
Could be. Doesn't seem so confusing to me as long as it's documented
clearly in the docstring, but YMMV.
--bb
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