Re: diagonal matrices specializations

[John W. Eaton]

On  3-Dec-2008, Søren Hauberg wrote:

| ons, 03 12 2008 kl. 14:31 +0100, skrev Jaroslav Hajek:
| > >> ans =
| > >> diagonal matrix (5x5)
| > >>    1       ..      0
| > >>        2
| > >>    :       3       :
| > >>                4
| > >>    0       ..      5
| > >>
| > >> the last form seems attractive, but maybe requires a bit more thinking
| > >> about how to place the dots etc.
| > >
| > > This I don't think will work. It would be very hard to read a 20x20
| > > matrix in a terminal with a width of 80 chars. But I agree, that it
| > > looks nice for small matrices.
| > >
| > 
| > But anyone trying to work visually with 20x20 matrices on a 80-column
| > terminal is bound to have problems.
| 
| Not if you print it like a vector, which I think we should just always
| do.

Since it seems unlikely that we will all agree on the best way to
display diagonal matrices, maybe it would be best to allow different
output formats based on some preference?  Perhaps as additional
options to the format function.  How about something like

  format diag full
  format diag row
  format diag column

I'm not sure about the format you show above.  It looks good for small
matrices with integer elements, but the expectation is that matrices
too wide for a terminal window will be wrapped, and I don't think this
format would look very good when wrapped, but maybe it would work.

jwe