On Thu, Feb 2, 2023 at 8:34 AM Stephen J. Turnbull <
stephenjturnb...@gmail.com> wrote:
> cd...@cam.ac.uk writes:
>
> > I don't want to be forced to learn lots of weird little functions
> > like `np.matmul(x1, x2)` when there's already one obvious syntax
> > I'm very familiar with: `x1 * x2`.
>
> I don't recall ever writing matrix multiplication that way in
> mathematics though. That's universally written as juxtaposition in my
> experience. And the obvious way to write it in Python (and np) has
> been "x1 @ x2" for some years now. In np, "*" means element-wise
> multiplication, I believe.
>
My 2 cents as a former mathematician:
Mathematicians have come up with hundreds of symbols to express the variety
of structures they are dealing with.
Just to list a few:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_operators_and_symbols_in_Unicode
https://oeis.org/wiki/List_of_LaTeX_mathematical_symbols
So +, *, -, /, @ and ** are a good start to express the most common
mathematical structures (groups, rings, vector spaces), and <, >, <=, >=,
==, != for ordered sets, but that's it.
It's great that Python supports overloading these operations. That's
something that drew me to Python when I was still working in computational
number theory, 25 years ago.
But that's probably not enough for some people. A way to add new symbols
(including non-ascii Unicode characters) and operations could have some
value, but also the drawback of tremendous additional complexity, specially
if done in the most generic way.
NB: on a very basic level, I remember trying, a few years ago, to use the
Unicode "empty set" symbol as a synonym for set(), and it didn't end well,
for several reasons, including the fact that Python didn't like it as a
variable name.
S.
--
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