MatPy question

[Uwe Schmitt]

Huaiyu Zhu <huaiyu at gauss.almadan.ibm.com> wrote:
| On 19 Nov 2001 15:31:13 GMT, Uwe Schmitt <uwe at rocksport.de> wrote:

|>I uses MatPy today and think it' quite useful. But there is one
|>incompatibility to matlab: in MatPy indices start at zero, in
|>Matlab they start at one. Is there a solution to adapt MatPy to
|>the Matlab style ?

| Although it is possible with some hacking, I don't think you would want to
| do that, because in Python all sequences are indexed this way, including
| NumPy arrays.  If that's changed there would be a lot of confusion when you
| transform between plain Python and numerical objects.

| Besides, there are many good reasons to start indexing from zero.  The open
| source Matlab-compatible language Octave allows both indexing from zero and
| one.  It defaults to start from zero, but if you choose an option (called
| "braindead" or something like that) it can start with one.  Braindead is not
| an easy option here. :-)

I'd prefer indexing from zero, because it's the notion used in
mathematics, most existing algorithms are formulated this way.

Greetings, Uwe.

-- 
Dr. rer. nat. Uwe Schmitt                       Uwe.Schmitt at num.uni-sb.de
Universitaet des Saarlandes                     Angewandte Mathematik
Building 36.1 Room 4.17         PO-Box 151150   D-66041 Saarbruecken
Mobile:0177/6806587    Fax:+49(0)681/302-4435   Office:+49(0)681/302-2468