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

[Travis Oliphant]

> 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 remember his work.   I really liked many of his suggestions, though it 
took him a while to recognize that a Matrix class has been distributed 
with Numeric from very early on.    Yes, it needed work, and a few of 
his ideas were picked up on and included in Numeric's Matrix object. 

I would like to see a standard Matrix class (along with the record-array 
class) also be included with the universal array.  

By the way, I've been calling the array object uarray in the PEP (kind 
of parallel to ufunc), but if others have better alternatives, I'm 
certainly not against them.  The problem with array is that it is taken 
by the arraymodule, which I don't want to try and replace at this point 
(I don't want to worry about backward compatibility with it...). 

I also like the name ndarray though.  I haven't heard what others think.

-Travis