[Numpy-discussion] Uncomfortable with matrix change

[Anne Archibald]

2008/5/9 Travis Oliphant <teoliphant at gmail.com>:

> After Nathan Bell's recent complaints, I'm a bit more uncomfortable with
> the matrix change to scalar indexing.   It does and will break code in
> possibly hard-to-track down ways.   Also, Nathan has been a *huge*
> contributor to the Sparse matrix in scipy and so I value his opinion
> about the NumPy matrix.  One of my goals is to have those two objects
> work together a bit more seamlessly.
>
> So, I think we need to:
>
> 1) Add a warning to scalar access
> 2) Back-out the change and fix all the places where NumPy assumes
> incorrectly that the number of dimensions reduce on PySequence_GetItem.
>
> Opinions?

This is certainly the conservative approach.

How much code is broken by this, compared to (say) the amount broken
by the disappearance of numpy.core.ma? Is this our biggest single API
breakage?

I do agree that we should be paying attention to people who are
actually using matrices, so I won't enter a vote.

Anne