[Numpy-discussion] Unifying numpy, scipy, and matplotlib docstring formats

[Alexandre Fayolle]

On Sun, Feb 25, 2007 at 06:44:37PM +0200, Jouni K. Seppänen wrote:
> "Barry Wark" <barrywark at gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Yes, I agree. I wasn't coming at so much from the goal of making Pylab
> > a Matlab clone (as you point out, that's silly, and misses much of the
> > advantage of Python), but rather from the goal of making interactive
> > use as efficient as possible. When I fire up ipython -pylab to do some
> > quick exploration, it's nice not to have to type N.blah or pylab.plot
> 
> IMHO the greatest strength of Matlab in interactive use is the matrix
> input format. For one thing, it is easier to type something like
> 
>   [0 1 0; 1 0 0; 0 0 1]
> 
> than
> 
>   array([[0,1,0],[1,0,0],[0,0,1]])


A very nice shortcut in my opinion is the one supported by the HP
scientific calculators (HP28, HP48 in my days), which would look like:

array([[0,1,0], 1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1])

I'm not quite sure how this could be generalized nicely for arbitrary
shapes, but for arrays of rank 2 (which are a very common case where
people are actually typing the values) it feels nice (especially on a
french keyboard where the square brackets are awkward to type in) 

-- 
Alexandre Fayolle                              LOGILAB, Paris (France)
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