From: jhrwalter (walter_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-01-19 10:20:55
--- In boost_at_y..., Toon Knapen <toon.knapen_at_s...> wrote:
> Looking at the slicing and ranging possibilities of both
multi_array and
> ublas, I find the concepts as they are currently defined
overlapping and
> limited in respect to e.g. Blitz++.
>
> The most important difference with Blitz++ is that slicing in
Blitz++
> speak means also reducing the order of the array. In ublas &
> multi_array, slicing means a 'strided range'. I think it is
important to
> define concepts in conformance with Blitz++ as it's still one of
the
> default array libraries out there.
A slice in ublas is conforming to the valarray slice ;-). A range is
the specialization of a slice with stride = 1. As we intentionally
chose to distinguish vectors and matrices (and *not* to model vectors
as m x 1 or 1 x n matrices) we needed to introduce different proxy
classes for order reduction.
To cite the Blitz++ documentation w.r.t. it's current
status: ,Blitz++ currently provides dense vectors and
multidimensional arrays. Some other features (matrices, random number
generators) are partially implemented.'
> But another concept I'm missing, and which is in neither of the
three
> libraries, is creating a sub-array (of the same order as the array)
that
> contains a specific selection of indices for every dimension of the
> array. e.g. in the 2D case I would like to do
> matrix< double > A(8,8);
> boost::array<3> i1 = { 0,1,6 };
> boost::array<5> i2 = { 5,6,7 };
> sub_matrix sub_A = submatrix(A, i1,i2 );
>
> where sub_A contains all element that are in columns 5,6 and 7 and
in
> rows 0,1 and 6. The difference with a range is thus that this sub-
array
> is not a continuous block in the original array. The diff with the
> current definition of slicing is that the selection does not need
to be
> strided.
>
> Is there a reason this kind of subarray does not exist ?
Interesting question. Should this sub matrix support dense matrices
only or sparse matrices also (the old question of genericity ;-)?
> With this kind
> of functionality though, I would never have to write loops over my
> matrices again as I currently rely on ublas to do this for me.
> Currently, my only loop is for assembling my FEM matrix from all
local
> element matrices which comes down basically to assigning a sub-
array
> with non-strided indices.
Sounds rather cool. Would you like to post some sample code?
Regards
Joerg