[SciPy-dev] matrix and ravel()

[Travis Oliphant]

Alan G Isaac wrote:

>>Travis Oliphant wrote: 
>>    
>>
>>>Not really a side-effect.  An intended feature.   Matrices are supposed 
>>>to be matrices (i.e. 2-d arrays).  They cannot be 1-d arrays no matter 
>>>how hard you try....  If you want to ravel a matrix and get a 1-d array 
>>>out,  you are not using matrices right....  Use a 1-d array (i.e. the .A 
>>>attribute). 
>>>      
>>>

>1. Better support for matrices is very welcome; I use them 
>   a lot.
>2. I expect ravel to return a 1-d array, not a matrix.  My 
>   background is a matrix programming language (GAUSS from 
>   before its N-dimensional array support), and yet the 
>  
>
>   behavior of ravel never surprised me.
>  
>
I'm less concerned about this issue because it is so easy to get an 
array out of a matrix.

>3. I expect a row and column vectorization functions (named 
>   e.g., vecr and vecc) to do row and column vectorization.  
>   I do not have a strong opinion on whether what is really 
>   wanted is a vec function that takes an axis argument, 
>   although this is probably right.  In particular, both row 
>   and column vectorization of matrices is common, and this 
>   is just a choice of axis.
>  
>
These are m.T.ravel()  and m.ravel()  right now.  To get a 1-d array it 
is m.A.ravel()

>The same goes double for asarray: it will be a really 
>unwanted surprise if it does not return an array.
>  
>
I'm much more concerned about this issue.    I would like to hear more 
people way in on what should be the behavior here.

In particular, here are two proposals.

1) current behavior

array (and asarray) --- returns the object itself if it is a sub-class 
of the array
                                      (or an array scalar).
asndarray ---  returns an actual nd array object



2) new behavior

array (and asarray)  always return an ndarray base-class object (or a 
big-nd array
                                       if the object is already one).
asanyarray ---  returns an nd-array or a sub-class if the object is 
already a sub-class.



Please weigh in...

--Travis








>fwiw,
>Alan Isaac
>
>
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