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Re: Removing broadcasting from Octave


From: Ben Abbott
Subject: Re: Removing broadcasting from Octave
Date: Wed, 14 Dec 2011 12:07:14 -0500

On Dec 14, 2011, at 11:31 AM, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

> I think the whole thing may simply be a bad idea.
> 
> The whole point was to do broadcasting as naturally and as frequently
> as Numpy does. However, we have to write code that works in Matlab,
> even if it's written for Octave. Plus we have the cultural baggage
> that this is not how Matlab works, therefore Octave should not work
> this way either.
> 
> I can just back out all the csets that enabled this. There's no point
> in introducing new syntax for this. We already have syntax, and the
> obscurity of some operator like x $./ y vs bsxfun(@rdivide, x, y) is
> not advantageous; they're both equally obscure, and the whole point
> was to make this natural and frequent by using common syntax.
> 
> I imagine there is more support for removing this feature than to keep it.
> 
> - Jordi G. H.

Until you brought "broadcasting" to my attention on this list, I had not 
encountered it before.

My first impression was that it would be confusing, but after more thought I 
decided it was a more consistent, and I like the idea of now worrying about 
including calls to repmat()

The only part I'm a bit concerned about is that each of the below behave the 
same.

        rand (4, 4) + (1:4)

        rand (4, 4) .+ (1:4)

Should the first throw an error?

Ben

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