Chris Rebert wrote:
On Sat, Jul 25, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Erik Max Francis<m...@alcyone.com> 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.
The pertinent issue here being that Python, as a language, is neither
matrix-oriented nor special-purpose. :)
Yes. And I was responding to the comment that such a feature of a
language would a priori be poor design. It _isn't_ poor design for
special purpose languages. Python isn't one of them, but Matlab _is_.
--
Erik Max Francis && m...@alcyone.com && http://www.alcyone.com/max/
San Jose, CA, USA && 37 18 N 121 57 W && AIM/Y!M/Skype erikmaxfrancis
More fodder for the new lost generation
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