[Numpy-discussion] Vectorized version of numpy.linspace

[Ralf Gommers]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2018 at 8:57 AM Stephan Hoyer <shoyer at gmail.com> wrote:

> It recently came up on GitHub (at part of the discussion in
> https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/12379) that numpy.linspace could,
> at least in principle, be modified to support array inputs:
>
> It looks like this has been requested on StackOverflow, too:
>
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/46694167/vectorized-numpy-linspace-across-multi-dimensional-arrays
>
> My tentative proposal:
> - "start" and "stop" are broadcast against each other to form start/stop
> arrays. (Or we could require that start/stop have matching shape.)
> - A new dimension of size "num" is inserted into the result, either along
> the first or last axis.
> - A new keyword argument "axis" could control where the axis is inserted
> in the result.
> - Vectorization support should be added in the same way to geomspace and
> logspace.
>
> Does this seem like a good idea? It's a relatively simple generalization,
> and one that I, at least, would find useful (I can think of a use-case in
> my own code that came up just last week).
>

This feels a bit forced. There's not much relevance to the minor
performance gain, and for code clarity it probably also wouldn't help
(actually it hurts usability for 99.x% of use cases by making the doc more
complicated). Not sure that it really would require a new axis argument, as
Marten said on the issue. Also, the num keyword cannot be vectorized,
unless one returns a list of arrays, which would actually be more natural
here than a 2-D array.

So, at best a don't care for me - I'm -0.5.

Cheers,
Ralf



>
> I doubt I'll have time to implement this myself in the near future, but I
> thought I would get the discussion going -- this might be a good project
> for a new contributor to work on.
>
> Cheers,
> Stephan
>
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