From octave-maintainers-request at octave dot org Mon Apr 26 10:01:50 2004
Subject: Re: 2nd: sparse matrices
From: Andy Adler <adler at site dot uottawa dot ca>
To: =?iso-8859-1?q?john=20popeye?= <popeye4713 at yahoo dot de>
cc: maintainers at octave dot org
Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 11:00:19 -0400 (EDT)

On Mon, 26 Apr 2004, john popeye wrote:

> Summary:
> Sparse matrices are a special case of the mathematical
> object "matrix". This special case was introduced due
> to the simple fact that you can be orders of magnitude
> more efficient when you apply certain restrictions on
> it.
> My recommendation is implementing such a feature makes
>  only sense if you do not restrict yourself by the way
> you implement it. Focus on what you could achieve with
> it and for what is was designed (LARGEness). (you do
> not buy an expensive car when all you do is moving it
> forward and backward in the garage a few meters, do
> you?)


Do you actually USE sparse matrices?

The Matlab sparse implementation (most of which is
offered by octave-forge) gives almost exactly what
you want, as well as some special features to do
things on sparse that you don't normally do on
full matrices.

Summary:
    What's wrong with the Matlab approach and what
    do you propose we do differntly?

Andy