On Sat, 25 Jul 2009 16:21:39 -0700, Erik Max Francis wrote: > Steven D'Aprano wrote: >> But it's not "practically every function". It's hardly any function at >> all -- in my code, I don't think I've ever wanted this behavior. I >> would consider it an error for function(42) and function([42]) to >> behave the same way. One is a scalar, and the other is a vector -- >> they're different things, it's poor programming practice to treat them >> identically. >> >> (If Matlab does this, so much the worse for Matlab, in my opinion.) > > There's actually good reason to do this in heavily matrix-oriented > specialized languages; there are numerous applications where scalars and > 1x1 matrices are mathematically equivalent.
I'm curious what those applications are, because regular multiplication behaves differently depending on whether you have a 1x1 matrix or a scalar: [[2]]*[[1, 2, 3], [2, 3, 4]] is not defined 2*[[1, 2, 3], [2, 3, 4]] = [[2, 4, 6], [2, 6, 8]] I'm curious as to what these applications are, and what they're actually doing. Kronecker multiplication perhaps? Do you have some examples of those applications? -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
