[Numpy-discussion] Matlab is a tool for doing numerical computations with matrices and vectors.

[Colin J. Williams]

The subject line is from http://www.math.utah.edu/lab/ms/matlab/matlab.html

I've seen little use of the words "matrix" or "vector" in the numarray 
stuff.  These are one or two dimensional structures.

The Numeric/numarray focus is on multidimensional arrays.

Some years ago,  Huaiyu Zhu made a number of postings advocating the 
introduction of a Python-based system permitting the usual matrix 
operations.  It seems that the culmination of these efforts was Matpy 
(http://matpy.sourceforge.net/), which is not currently active.

I was impressed with the case made by Huaiyu Zhu and have attempted to 
carry on in this direction.  An outline of this work is at: 
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cjw/IntroToPyMatrix.pdf.

This work was based on numarray, partly because it was generally 
considered to be the way ahead and partly because it purported to 
provide a class structure.  numarray has proved to be a bit of a moving 
target.

I am continuing this work in the hope that some class-based structures 
will come out of the current Numeric3 discussions.  The hope is also 
that there is a need out there for matrix operations, as distinct from 
array operations.

Colin W.