4 ms·

I want to point out that axpy is an abbreviation of a * x + y, pronounced "a x plus y", hence axpy. So I disagree with "un-systematic".

• jacobolus 9y ago
  “Systematic” would be e.g. `ab`, `ax`, `axpy`, `kx`, instead of `mm`, `mv`, `axpy`, `scal`. (Or whatever other preferred system, hopefully something carefully thought through rather than slapped together.) The names are obviously meaningful, they’re just fairly ad-hoc and not guessable a priori.
  • dragandj 9y ago
    I may offer you an angle here: xpy uses x and y because x and y could be vectors, but can also be matrices mm can not be used for vectors, only for matrices. Of course, the main reason is that these are names used for the last 40+ years in the standard for this type of software, BLAS.
  • conistonwater 9y ago
    I would say mm and mv name the types of the arguments, like a kind of Hungarian notation, which makes them okay. I think `ab`, `ax`, `axpy` make the problem worse: in the first two a and b are matrices and in the last a is a scalar. As for `kx`, anything named `k` is usually supposed to be an integer like everywhere else in mathematics (why not `ax` then?). As for scal-scale and nrm-norm, I have no idea why they did that, it seems wrong to me too. Furthermore, it's a specialist expert subdomain—the names are already so standard that everybody who needs them already knows them or looks them up in a second. So I don't see "not guessable" as a valid criticism.