[Python-Dev] Infix operators (original) (raw)

Josiah Carlson josiah.carlson at gmail.com
Fri Jul 25 04:47:24 CEST 2008

On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 7:08 PM, Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:

Fredrik Johansson wrote:

Anyway, it is easy to define pseudo-operators in Python;

A matrixmul B A dot B A cross B A elementwise B Urg. This is another one of those recipes that I consider is too clever for its own good. Very nice in theory, but I would never use it in real life.

That's unfortunate ;), because it's available in Python today, and with the common local caching of globals, can be as short as 3 characters (M for matrixmul, D for dot, X for cross, E for elementwise).

What's more, it doesn't address the real problem at hand, which is providing a notation for matrix multiplication that is concise enough to be used very frequently -- like multiple times in every line of code that manipulates matrices.

This is the first time anyone has mentioned "conciseness" in this thread. And what's a 3 character operator between friends? The "and" and "not" operators don't seem to be bothered by three characters. ;)

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