Re: n-dim matrices

At 12:09 PM 8/31/00 -0400, Karl Glazebrook wrote:
>This is beginning to sound like something I would support.
>
>Heavens are we approaching some sort of consensus.

The one thing the proposal I mentioned doesn't cover is Jeremy's desire to 
have $a[$i][$j][$j] be synonymous with $a[[$i,$j,$k]], and 
@a[$i,$x][$j,$y][$k,$z] be synonymous with @a[[$i,$j,$k],[$x,$y,$z]].  I 
didn't mention them because they aren't something I agree with, so it's not 
part of the compromise that I see.

>This also addresses one pain in current PDL which is the
>difficulty of multi-dim indexing.
>
>Buddha Buck wrote:

<snip>

> > print $a[[0,0,0]];    # literal ref list
> > print $a[0;0;0];      # literal singleton ; list
> > print $a[[$y,$y,$y]]; # variable-based ref list
> > print $a[$y;$y;$y];   # variable-based singleton ; list
> > print $a[[@lorigin]]; # ref to copy of array variable
> > print $a[\@lorigin];  # ref of array variable
> > print $a[$rorigin];   # ref variable
> > print $a[diagonal(0)];# function that returns array ref
> >
> > There...  8 ways to do it...
>
>Do we really need 8 ways?

Jeremy would add way 9 and 10...  What was it Larry said about having 10 
ways to do it?

print $a[0][0][0];
print $a[$y][$y][$y];

To be fair, there is really only two (three) ways to do it:

$a[0;0;0] and $a[[0,0,0]] (and $a[0][0][0]).  The other seven are just ways 
to  compute the listrefs needed at runtime.

>Karl