[Numpy-discussion] proposing a "beware of [as]matrix()" warning

[Charles R Harris]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2010 at 10:08 AM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn <
dagss at student.matnat.uio.no> wrote:

> David Warde-Farley wrote:
> > Trying to debug code written by an undergrad working for a colleague of
> > mine who ported code over from MATLAB, I am seeing an ugly melange of
> > matrix objects and ndarrays that are interacting poorly with each other
> > and various functions in SciPy/other libraries. In particular there was
> > a custom minimizer function that contained a line "a * b", that was
> > receiving an Nx1 "matrix" and a N-length array and computing an outer
> > product. Hence the unexpected 6 GB of memory usage and weird results...
>
> If this was in a library function of some sort, I think they should
> always call np.asarray on the input arguments. That converts matrices to
> normal arrays.
>
> It could have been Python lists-of-lists, other PEP 3118 objects -- in
> Python an object can be everything in general, and I think it is very
> proper for most reusable functions to either validate the type of their
> arguments or take some steps to convert.
>
> That said, I second that it would be good to deprecate the matrix class
> from NumPy. The problem for me is not the existance of a matrix class as
> such, but the fact that it subclasses np.ndarray and is so similar with
> it, breaking a lot of rules for OO programming in the process.
>
>
Yeah. Masked arrays have similar problems. Pierre has done so much work to
have masked versions of the various functions that it might as well be a
standalone class.

<snip>

Chuck
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