[Matrix-SIG] "data" class?

Konrad Hinsen hinsen@ibs.ibs.fr
Thu, 16 Apr 1998 17:29:57 +0200


> More and more frequently I've been coming up against problems
> that make me wish I had a general class to hold a collection of
> data pairs, represented by two NumPpy arrays, along with
> associated information such as names, descriptions and units.

I guess a more general and thus more useful class would
be a "table" of data. Ideally it's functionality would be
that of a spreadsheet. That's overkill, of course, but I think
spreadsheets could serve as a design guideline anyway.

The big problem is defining how operations on such an object
should be performed. For example, multiplication by a scalar
could mean multiplying everything, or just specific rows or
columns, depending on the interpretation of the data. Maybe
different classes would be necessary.

This is definitely a worthy project, but not a trivial one...
-- 
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