[Numpy-discussion] ndarray.T2 for 2D transpose

[Joseph Martinot-Lagarde]

Nathaniel Smith <njs <at> pobox.com> writes:

> An alternative that was mentioned in the bug tracker
> (https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/7495), possibly by me, would be
> to have arr.T2 act as a stacked-transpose operator, i.e. treat an arr
> with shape (..., n, m) as being a (...)-shaped stack of (n, m)
> matrices, and transpose each of those matrices, so the output shape is
> (..., m, n). And since this operation intrinsically acts on arrays
> with shape (..., n, m) then trying to apply it to a 0d or 1d array
> would be an error.

I think that the problem is not that it doesn't raise an error for 1D array,
but that it doesn't do anything useful to 1D arrays. Raising an error would
change nothing to the way transpose is used now.

For a 1D array a of shape (N,), I expect a.T2 to be of shape (N, 1), which
is useful when writing formulas, and clearer that a[None].T. Actually I'd
like a.T to do that alreadu, but I guess backward compatibility is more
important.