[Numpy-discussion] vander() docstring

[Charles R Harris]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 5:22 PM, Andreas Klöckner <lists at informa.tiker.net>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The docstring for vander() seems to contradict what the function does. In
> particular, the columns in the vander() output seem reversed wrt its
> docstring. I feel like one of the two needs to be fixed, or is there
> something I'm not seeing?
>
> This here is fresh from the Numpy examples page:
>
> 8< docstring -----------------------------------------------
> X = vander(x,N=None)
>
> The Vandermonde matrix of vector x.  The i-th column of X is the
> the i-th power of x.  N is the maximum power to compute; if N is
> None it defaults to len(x).
>
> 8< Example -------------------------------------------------
> >>> from numpy import *
> >>> x = array([1,2,3,5])
> >>> N=3
> >>> vander(x,N) # Vandermonde matrix of the vector x
> array([[ 1,  1,  1],
> [ 4,  2,  1],
> [ 9,  3,  1],
> [25,  5,  1]])
> 8< ---------------------------------------------------------
>
The docstring is incorrect. The Vandermonde matrix produced is compatible
with numpy polynomials that also go from high to low powers. I would have
done it the other way round, so index matched power, but that isn't how it
is.

Chuck
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