Question

I need to represent immutable vectors in Python (“vectors” as in linear algebra, not as in programming). The tuple seems like an obvious choice.

The trouble is when I need to implement things like addition and scalar multiplication. If a and b are vectors, and c is a number, the best I can think of is this:

tuple(map(lambda x,y: x + y, a, b)) # add vectors 'a' and 'b'
tuple(map(lambda x: x * c, a))      # multiply vector 'a' by scalar 'c'

which seems inelegant; there should be a clearer, simpler way to get this done — not to mention avoiding the call to tuple, since map returns a list.

Is there a better option?

Answer 1

NumPy supports various algebraic operations with its arrays.