Re: Meaning of * (mtimes) for nd-arrays

[Juan Pablo Carbajal]

On Tue, Feb 16, 2016 at 9:49 PM, Marco Atzeri <address@hidden> wrote:
> On 16/02/2016 20:13, Nicholas Jankowski wrote:
>>
>>
>>     one(1,1,3) is not the same as one(1,3). I never said the oposite. The
>>     behavior when multiplying by a vector is what is equivalent (it seems
>>     only in Octave). You see, a singleton left dimension is rather
>>     useless...but I grant that one could stick to that. But as Jordi
>>     mentioned many times there are plenty of generalizations, e.g.
>>     if (n x 1) * (1 x m) gives n x m, then  (n x 1) * (1 x 1 x m) gives (1
>>     x n x m), or (n x 1 x m), or (n x m)? note, tat the last one is the
>>     "squeeze" of the first one and it seems what the programmer chose.
>>
>>     So I guess we will have to stick to matlab idiosyncrasy and fix this
>>     to give an error... anyways, is this the results of broadcasting? No
>>     way of checking the Octave:broadcast warning anymore, but I wouldn't
>>     think so.
>>
>>
>> Yes, sorry I was being a bit pedantic on that. I figured you knew the
>> difference but I was just being explicit.
>>
>> In any case, I'd argue that a singleton left dimension is not completely
>> useless. I put a model together last year that made heavy use of
>> n-vectors to orthogonalize the process. Combined with broadcasting, it
>> made bookkeeping rather straight forward with dims 1 and 2 being the 2x2
>> transfer functions, 3 being the spatial degree of freedom, 4 being the
>> eigenvalue d.o.f., 5 being ... something else.
>>
>> In any case, almost no basic matrix functions accept anything with ndims
>> ~= 2. I think some people have written n-D array functions, but the base
>> * should throw an error rather than squeeze the user's data for them. I
>> wouldn't think broadcasting would be to blame here, as it shouldn't come
>> up without invoking .*  , should it?
>>
>> nickj
>>
>
> It seems a curious extension of broadcasting
> always having max two dimension as output
>
> octave:15> ones(2,3)*ones(3,1)
> ans =
>
>    3
>    3
>
> octave:16> ones(2,3)*ones(3,1,2)
> ans =
>
>    3   3
>    3   3
>
> octave:17> ones(2,3)*ones(3,1,2,2)
> ans =
>
>    3   3   3   3
>    3   3   3   3
>
> octave:18> ones(2,3)*ones(3,1,2,2,2)
> ans =
>
>    3   3   3   3   3   3   3   3
>    3   3   3   3   3   3   3   3
>
>
> The error messages gives a hint on what is happening:
>
> octave:34> ones(2,2,3)*ones(3,2,2,2)
> error: operator *: nonconformant arguments (op1 is 2x6, op2 is 3x8)
> octave:34> ones(2,2,3)*ones(3,2,2)
> error: operator *: nonconformant arguments (op1 is 2x6, op2 is 3x4)
> octave:34> ones(2,2,2)*ones(2,2,2)
> error: operator *: nonconformant arguments (op1 is 2x4, op2 is 2x4)
>
>
>
I think this deserves a ticket in the tracker. Who goes for it?