[Numpy-discussion] numpy release

[Alan G Isaac]

I think the use of the term 'vector' in this
thread is becoming a bit confusing.

An M by N matrix is a vector.  (I.e., it is
an element of a vector space.)

Many people use the terms "row vector" and "column
vector" to refer to special matrices.  What is
special is *not* that they are vectors (since
all matrices are) but that they are a single
row or a single column.  Perhaps better
terminology would have been "row matrix" and
"column matrix".  Using this terminology, we
clearly expect a row matrix and a column matrix
to have transposes.  The question is, can their
elements be indexed by scalars.  The answer in
all the proposals, I believe, is "yes".

I believe we are finding that this answer has
some problems.

        x is a 2 by 2 matrix
        x[0] is a 1 by 2 matrix
        x[0][0] is x[0,0]       GOOD!!
        y = x[0] -> y is a 1 by 2 matrix
        y[0][0] is a TypeError  BAD!!

So I am becoming more and more persuaded that
for a matrix ``x``:

        x[0] should be a 1d array (always!)
        x[0,:] should be a matrix

The rule:

        use non-scalar indexing to extract submatrices

fwiw,
Alan Isaac