Tuesday, December 25, 2012

Matrix operations

So my first piece of code will be with respect to matrix operations. NumPy already has many in-built functions, but I still want to do this because I want to write my own code in the beginning rather than just use in-built components. So here goes matrix.py.








A few thoughts particularly with respect to my ex-darling C++.

1. There isn't the possibility of overloading the "=" assignment operator. So is I want "a" and "b" as arrays and I want to do:
a=b
This will only cause a reference "a" to point to the the object "b". A copy will not be made. So if I change "b" later, "a" changes too. Which is not what I want. So I need to define the __call__ method. This was I could do:
a(b)
But of course you would need to define "a" as a matrix before this is run.

2. Indentation is a requirement in Python. It improves the readability of code. True. But doing away with braces {}, or the begin/end statement blocks is probably going too far. Just a beginner's thought anyway.

3. Function/Operator overloading: In C++, you can overload a function any number of times with a different number of variables, different type of variables etc. So an overloaded function could accept a float or a string and two completely different functions can be written. In Python, everything is an object. So you can't specify float or Matrix before an argument in a function/method. You have to figure out what that is inside the functions. This I feel is unnecessary ambiguity.
I was trying to code the "*" oveload operator for matrices, and would like to have the possibility of multiplying two matrices or a matrix and a float/integer. But the only was to do that was inside the overloaded operator. A little googling told me that type checking was not a good idea. Probably because they want to have  the possibility fo redefining the types or maybe defining additional super-types in later releases of Python. So the only thing I could use was exception handling. The code works but this isn't really an exception. This is a normal varation to the manner in which the operator is used on matrices. So seems odd.

4. Two more functions may be written depending on need - inverse and upper triangularization or lower triangularization. This will be decided later. The idea would be solve equations of the order Ax=b or E*d/dt(x)=Ax+bu. Using inverse to solve equations is usually avoided as matrix even close to singular will cause the simulation to blow up. So more on this later.

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