[ublas] Assignement operation proposal.

Subject: [ublas] Assignement operation proposal.
From: Nasos Iliopoulos (nasos_i_at_[hidden])
Date: 2010-03-21 15:45:57

Dear all,
I would like to propose the following for addition into uBlas.

I suppose many of you miss the functionality of creating certain matrices or vectors as in plain c:

double vec[] = {0.1, 2.0, 5.0. 0.3}

and are forced to element wise define it in ublas with:
vec(0) = 0.1;
vec(1) = 2.0;
....

Insipired by the fucntionality of boost.assignment, i decided to implement something similar in ublas. Unfortunately due to the special way ublas is handling its containers I did not find it that convenient to use boost.assignment.

With the proposed classes (in the attached file) it is possible to fill vectors and matrices like that:

vector<double> vec(3);
vec << 1.0, 2.0, 3.0;

vector_range<vector<double> > vr (a, range (1, 3));
vr << 11.0, 12.0;

matrix<double> mat(3,3);
mat << 1.0, 2.0, 3.0,
       4.0, 5.0, 6.0,
       7.0, 8.0, 9.0;

or even:
mat << 1.0, 2.0, 3.0,
       vec,
       7.0, 8.0, 9.0;

you can also use this form:

vector<double> vec(10);
vec << 1.0 , project(a, range(0,2)), 10.0, 11.0, a, 15.0, 16.0;

Another nice trick that is especially useful for sparse matrices and vectors is:

compressed_matrix<double> cm(3,4, 3*4);
 cm <<  non_vector(4),
        1.0, 2.0, project(a,range(0,2)),
        non_vector(3),2;

where the non_vector free functions returns a "non vector" object that is used to traverse the expression without modifying it.

I would appreciate your general feedback, thoughts, critisism as well as your opinion in the following issues:
- Are there any features beside those presented above and in the attached example that you probably would like to see?
- Where do you think this should be added? As a separate header file, or included in vector_ and matrix_ expression headers?
- I found it incovenient to implement this functionallity using iterators (especially when the functions work on sparse types). Does anybody think there are considerable gains if attempting that?
- I also consider implementing functionality so that project(a, range(..)) << ...; is possible, but I initially faced some problems. I think that _range and _slice classes need to include an operator<< in order for this to work. If somebody wants to work on that it would be great.
I will write the unit tests if the maintainers consider the proposed code for addition into uBlas.

Best Regards
Nasos Iliopoulos
                                               
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