Is there any reason to introduce this intermediate variable (sz)?

[Dave Farrance]

fl <rxjwg98 at gmail.com> wrote:

>Hi,
>I find the following code snippet, which is useful in my project:
> ...
>correctly. Could you see something useful with variable 'sz'?

So that's example code in "An Introduction to the Kalman Filter" by Greg
Welch and Gary Bishop, and no, that construct was unnecessary. As you've
figured out, you can use the integer directly.

It's the usual problem that people get when they switch from using
Octave/Matlab to numpy/scipy/matplotlib. The former are better in an
interactive maths-oriented environment, but people then often then
switch to Python for more complex algorithms to take advantage of the
features of an advanced general-purpose programming language. The
problem that people then run into is that although there are equivalents
in the Python libraries for most of the Matlab functions, this happens
to be an area where the documentation is particularly uneven.

"Pylab" is a project that attempted to be a Python equivalent of Matlab,
but has now become a depreciated appendix to matplotlib. There have been
attempts to restart it as a feature of Ipython, but although it mostly
works, the documentation is almost nonexistent. The only way to figure
out what it can do is to try it yourself with a lot of trial and error.

Anyway, don't be surprised if you see unnecessary elaborations in
maths/science Python code because it's what you expect when people are
arriving at code that works from reading poor documentation, trial and
error, and Googling other peoples code snippets. Just try it yourself
and save yourself time rather than asking for hand-holding.