[Numpy-discussion] design issues - octave 'incompatibilities'

[Robert Kern]

Soeren Sonnenburg wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> I am new to numarray and as I am trying to use it day-by-day
> I am now wondering about certain numeric/numarray design issues. Please
> forgive me / correct me as I probably misunderstood certain issues.
> 
> -- Why did you choose row-major instead of column major format as
> practiced by R/octave/matlab... Doesn't that mean performance problems
> as fortran/blas is optimized if you work with the transposed version ?

Not everyone is interfacing with optimized FORTRAN code. Those who are 
are usually using ATLAS as their BLAS, and ATLAS has row-major versions 
of the BLAS subroutines. Row-major is C's convention and 
numarray/Numeric largely follow that. There are of course some 
performance issues when interfacing with FORTRAN code that expects 
column-major, but there would be other performance problems if 
numarray/Numeric were column-major and interfacing with row-major code.

> -- why do vectors have no 'orientation', i.e. there are only row but no
> column vectors (or why do you treat matrices/vectors differently, i.e.
> have vectors at all as a separate type)

You can certainly make column vectors.

In [1]: a = arange(5)

In [2]: a
Out[2]: NumPy array, format: long
[0 1 2 3 4]

In [3]: a.shape = (5,1)

In [4]: a
Out[4]: NumPy array, format: long
[[0]
  [1]
  [2]
  [3]
  [4]]

Often, though, a "row" vector can also be used in place of a "column" 
vector. Although sometimes not:

> -- How can one obtain submatrices from full matrices:

In [6]: import numarray

In [7]: a = numarray.arange(1, 10)

In [8]: a.shape = (3,3)

In [9]: a
Out[9]:
array([[1, 2, 3],
        [4, 5, 6],
        [7, 8, 9]])

In [10]: i = [0,1]

In [11]: j = [[0],[2]]

In [12]: a[i,j]
Out[12]:
array([[1, 4],
        [3, 6]])

> -- why don't you allow iterating over the whole matrix via a single
> index ?

ravel()

> Are there more elegant ways to do this ? Which issues are likely to be
> fixed in the future ?

None. They're not broken, just different from what you are used to.

-- 
Robert Kern
rkern at ucsd.edu

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
  Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
   -- Richard Harter