[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] Naming Conventions And Practical Experience

[Konrad HINSEN]

   lack the time to sit down and do a careful redesign.  The current
   feature set is significantly more powerful than the basic array
   operations provided by matlab, the most popular array processing
   language that people buy.

Also the worst one, mostly because it is "historically grown" from a
very restrictive basis (LINPACK).

   Rather than complaining about the lack of a list of the available
   functions, David Ascher recently sat down and pulled them out of the C
   and python source code (not too hard to do, since I did include doc
   strings for everything).  Check out his beta tutorial

I know, and in fact I have postponed my own attempts waiting for him
to be continue the investigation. I wasn't really complaining, but
providing an excuse for not having done something until now.

   If somebody else out there has the time and energy to design a
   complete set of functions and methods for the system, go for it.  If

I volunteer to do so, but can't promise any deadline. I am also doing
all my work on Python as a side project, so I fully sympathize with
your problems of allocating time to it!

   Sorry for the negative tone, but I've been getting a few too many
   questions like "So how's your speech recognition system coming along?"
   from my advisor lately and I'm eager to get the array object "out the
   door".  Bug fixes take up very little of my intellectual energy, but

I fully understand that, but I don't see the need to rush. After all,
we are doing something close to language design, which has never
profited from tight deadlines. Rather than rush out a beta version to
the public, I advocate a public alpha release that comes with no
promise about stability of function names etc. We need all the test
users we can get! Why make any commitments without anybody forcing us?

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Konrad Hinsen                     | E-Mail: hinsenk@ere.umontreal.ca
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