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

[Travis Oliphant]

On Apr 28, 2010, at 11:50 AM, Nikolaus Rath wrote:

> Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> writes:
>>> Overloading '*' and '**' while convenient does have  
>>> consequences.   It
>>> would be nice if we could have a few more infix operators in  
>>> Python to
>>> allow separation of  element-by-element calculations and "dot- 
>>> product"
>>> calculations.
>
> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0225/ was considered and rejected.
> But that was in 2000...
>
>>> While I don't have any spare cycles to push it forward and we are
>>> already far along on the NumPy to 3.0, I had wondered if we couldn't
>>> use the leverage of Python core developers wanting NumPy to be  
>>> ported
>>> to Python 3 to actually add a few more infix operators to the  
>>> language.
>
> I don't think that stands a chance: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3003/

Frankly, I still think we should move forward.  It will take us as  
long as the moratorium is in effect to figure out what operators we  
want anyway and we can do things like put attributes on arrays in the  
meantime to implement the infix operators we think we need.

It's too bad we don't have more of a voice with the Python core  
team.    This is our fault of course (we don't have people with spare  
cycles to spend the time interfacing), but it's still too bad.

-Travis