Discussion: Introducing new operators for matrix computation

[John Lull]

At the dawn of the third millenium (by the common reckoning),
hzhu at localhost.localdomain (Huaiyu Zhu) wrote (with possible
deletions):

> I think cleanness is one of the main virtue of python, but it is lacking in
> numerical computation.  To give an example of the difference it makes, I'll
> quote from my original post asking for matrix in python (with corrections)
> 
> [in octave we write]
> > b = X\y                  # LMS solution of a linear equation y = X*b
> > b = (X'*X)\(X'*y)        # or written out in more details
> > b = inv(X'*X)*(X'*y)     # or in a less efficient form.
> > 
> > but the corresponding Python notation is horrendous:
> > 
> > b = matrixmultiply(inverse(matrixmultiply(transpose(X), X)), 
> >     (matrixmultiply(transpose(X), y[:,NewAxis])))

I'm don't think this is quite fair.  You could just as easily write:
    b = rDiv(X, y)
if you simply had an appropriate rDiv() function.  It's not nearly as
pretty as octave's notation, but it doesn't have to be nearly as
hideous as your example.

Regards,
John