The NumPy Fortran-ordering quiz

[Travis Oliphant]

Stefan van der Walt wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Some of you may have seen the interesting thread on Fortran-ordering
> earlier.  I thought it might be fun to set up a short quiz which tests
> your knowledge on the topic.
>
> If you're up for the challenge, take a look at
>
> http://mentat.za.net/numpy/quiz
>
> I won't be held liable for any emotional trauma caused, self-inflicted
> wounds or brain-core meltdowns.
>   

Cute (especially the comment if you get them all right).   I'm not sure 
if this quiz is a veiled complaint about the rules for Fortran ordering 
or not ;-)

In my mind the Fortran ordering rules are consistent (if not completely 
bug-free).   You just have to get the right idea of what is meant by the 
order argument when you use it.   If you think you are having trouble 
figuring out the rules, think of the trouble it was to figure out what 
they should be and then to code them up.

Two rules help you pass the quiz with a perfect score:

1) On array construction, the order argument allows you to specify how 
the array will be organized in memory.  This has no effect on what is 
printed as the user doesn't usually care how the array is stored in 
memory.   So, you can ignore all order=  expressions in the array 
construct for the quiz

2) On reshaping, the order argument specifies how you think the array is 
organized.  Whenever you make a significant reshape you are telling the 
computer to re-interpret the chunk of data in a different way, it makes 
a big difference as to how you think about that chunk of data.  Do you 
think of it as organized rows-first (C-order) or columns-first 
(Fortran-order).   The order argument allows you to specify how you 
think about it and indicates the 1-d indexing order of the array.  It 
also fills in the newly-shaped array in exactly that same order.   
Semantically, one could technically separate those two concepts and have 
one order argument that specifies how you think about the input and 
another that specifies how you think about the output.   But, I really 
didn't want to go there and couldn't see a real advantage to that.  So, 
the single order argument specifies how you think about both.

-Travis




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