Re: New variable type: matrix

Baris wrote:

> My motivation was to give more freedom to the developers of pdl so that
> they can freely create the syntax without worrying about the workarounds.
> Matlab, in my opinion, is much more natural to code than current pdl.

It'd be interesting to hear what you dislike in particular.

> By
> the way I am pretty much happy with $pdl notation and I really hate @pdl
> notation and I find it confusing.

I agree (but not many others seem to).

> You forgot that there is a dimentionality associated with a piddle
> elements.
> $p = pdl [1];
> is not equavalent to
> $p = pdl [[1]];
> and neither of them are equivalent to
> $p =1; # I think there should be a 0 dimentional pdl also so that we can
> have compact scalars.

There is: $p = pdl 1;
However, it is not really compact due to the overhead a piddle has to
carry around. A perl scalar is probably still as compact as it gets
(maybe explicit typing can cut down a bit more).

> 
> >http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg00329.html
> 
> It is great that perl is similar to speaking english and it is more closer
> to how we behave in our daily lives, but there is something missing here.
> When was the last time you needed to multiply two matrices in your daily
> life? Yes people learn a language such as English and I realy like that
> writing perl programs is like speaking English, (in a natural way). But we
> also did learn another language, which is called mathematics. IMHO I don't
> think pdl should follow the natural language path, but the mathematics
> path. How do we explain things in mathematical terms? Pdl should be natural
> in a sense that I should be able to code my program in a similar way that I
> answer a math question in a linear algebra exam.

Syntax examples? Sounds like functional programming.

  Christian