Re: Naming of the complex diagonal matrix class.

[Jason Riedy]

I write:
> It may be too late to change, but would a patch to make complex
> diagonal matrices into diagonal complex matrices be accepted?

And John W. Eaton responds:
> These names are not new, so we should probably not just change
> them as that would force a lot of code to change.  If we decide to
> change the names, would typdefs work to preserve the old names?

Those names have been in a released stable version?  It'd be nice to
have all the names parallel in a stable version...  Sure would help my
cdm v. dcm typos.

> If we do decide to change the names, I would like to consider a larger
> renaming, [...]

Now *that* is for later and probably should be evolutionary rather than
one large change.  I'm just asking for consistency within one stable
release.

And Jaroslav Hajek responds::
> Besides, I think that it's the sparse complex matrix that is misnamed,
> not complex diagonal matrices.

But SparseComplexMatrix and scm have been around for a while now...

> This scheme is consistent throughout the rest of naming, where you can
> combine, e.g. "scalar" or "matrix" with all prefixes "float_",
> "complex_", "float_complex_". Similarly for "diag_matrix".

There is no single-precision sparse matrix.  The names that don't fit
the existing scheme, <structure>-(<element type>-)?(matrix|ndarray) are
the *new* diagonal matrices.

> I was aware of this when I chose the naming, but changing the sparse
> matrix naming didn't seem that important.

Thanks.  My external code appreciates not having to change all its
type names.

Jason, token sparse matrix user