On 08/02/15 23:17, Stefan Reiterer wrote: > Actually I use numpy for several years now, and I love it. > The reason that I think silent broadcasting of sums is bad > comes simply from the fact, that I had more trouble with it, than it > helped me.
In Fortran 90, broadcasting allows us to write concise expressions which are compiled into very efficient machine code. This would be very difficult for the compiler if the code used explicit repeats and reshapes instead of broadcasting. In NumPy and Matlab, this aspect is not equally important. But broadcasting makes array expressions more terse, and is save some redundant array copies. NumPy code tends to be memory bound; broadcasting can therefore improve performance, particularly when arrays are large. But the effect is not as dramatic as it is in Fortran. Readability is also important. Vectorized Matlab code quickly degenerates into a mess of reshapes and repmats, and can be very hard to read. NumPy and Fortran 90 codes do not loose the readability like this even in the most complicated array expressions. Sturla _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
