[Numpy-discussion] generalized_inverse

[Charles R Harris]

On 7/15/06, Travis Oliphant <oliphant.travis at ieee.org> wrote:
>
> Victoria G. Laidler wrote:
> > Jonathan Taylor wrote:
> >


<snip>

It's not that we're concerned with MATLAB compatibility.  But, frankly
> I've never heard that the short names MATLAB uses for some very common
> operations are a liability.   So, when a common operation has a short,
> easily-remembered name that is in common usage, why not use it?
>
> That's basically the underlying philosophy.   NumPy has too many very
> basic operations to try and create very_long_names for them.
>
> I know there are differing opinions out there.   I can understand that.
> That's why I suspect that many codes I will want to use will be written
> with easy_to_understand_but_very_long names and I'll grin and bear the
> extra horizontal space that it takes up in my code.


What is needed in the end is a good index with lots of crossreferences. Name
choices are just choices, there is no iso standard for function names that I
know of. There are short names have been used for so long that everyone
knows them (sin, cos, ...), some names come in two standard forms (arcsin,
asin) some are fortran conventions (arctan2), some are matlab conventions
(pinv, chol). One always has to learn what the names for things are in any
new language, so the best thing is to make it easy to find out.

Chuck
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