[Numpy-discussion] deprecate numpy.matrix

[Pauli Virtanen]

10.02.2014 23:13, Alan G Isaac kirjoitti:
> On 2/10/2014 4:03 PM, Pauli Virtanen wrote:
>> What sparked this discussion (on Github) is that it is not
>> possible to write duck-typed code that works correctly for:
> 
> Do you mean one must start out with an 'asarray'? Or more than
> that?

Starting with asarray won't work: sparse matrices are not subclasses
of ndarray. Matrix-free linear operators are not such either.

In Python code, you usually very seldom coerce your inputs to a
specific type. The situation here is a bit as if there were two
different stream object types in Python, and their .write() methods
did completely different things, so that code doing I/O would need to
always be careful with which type of a stream was in question.

> As I detailed in past discussion, the one thing I really do not
> like about the `matrix` design is that indexing always returns a
> matrix. I speculate this is the primary problem you're running
> into?

The fact that reductions to 1D return 2D objects is also a problem,
but the matrix multiplication vs. elementwise multiplication and
division is also an issue.

-- 
Pauli Virtanen