Addition of UniformScaling with scalar breaks associativity

[toivoh]

Currently, addition of a UniformScaling and a scalar results in a scalar:

julia> I + 1
2

But this breaks associativity:

julia> Z = zeros(Int,2,2)
2×2 Array{Int64,2}:
 0  0
 0  0

julia> (Z + I) + 1
2×2 Array{Int64,2}:
 2  1
 1  2

julia> Z + (I + 1)
2×2 Array{Int64,2}:
 2  2
 2  2

If I+1 had produced 2I instead, the last result had been [2 0; 0 2], so it is not how addition of UniformScaling and scalars is defined that is the problem, but simply the fact that it is defined at all.

I suggest to deprecate and then remove addition of UniformScaling and scalars.

[andreasnoack]

So after all, automatic broadcasting of + and - is ambiguous. Maybe it's time to require .+ again. 😃

[StefanKarpinski]

Wouldn't defining I + 1 to produce 2I make this associative? Meanwhile I .+ 1 should continue to produce 2.

[andreasnoack]

I don't think so. Wouldn't it be
(I + 1) + zeros(2,2) = 2I + zeros(2,2) = eye(2)
but
I + (1 + zeros(2,2)) = I + ones(2,2) = [2 1; 1 2]

[StefanKarpinski]

Yeah, ok, so I guess that I .+ 1 should be 2 and I + 1 should be an error. If we had insisted on .+ for matrix addition then this wouldn't have been a problem, but I think this isn't a huge sacrifice.

[toivoh]

I don't have access to julia atm, but since + has basically been defined to act like .+ when one argument is a scalar, and I stands for an identity matrix of indeterminate size, I would expect

(Z .+ I) .+ 1

to give the same result as

(Z + I) + 1

and thus give rise to the same problems. So now that you mention .+, I don't think that I .+ 1 should be legal either.

If we had gone with requiring .+ to add a scalar elementwise to an array, then scalars would have worked more or less as UniformScaling does now (except when broadcasting at least) and we probably wouldn't have needed I, which would indeed have got rid of this issue.

I think it was clear when we let 1+A::Array be elementwise that (1+A)*B would not produce the same result as 1*B + A*B violating distributivity, but we accepted that infraction to avoid the inconvenience of writing so many dots.

But I don't think that I+1 or I.+1 provides anywhere near that kind of utility in exchange for violating distributivity.

[dlfivefifty]

I think this issue needs to be revisited when +(::Matrix, ::Number) is removed in favour of .+, as the example is no longer valid.

I propose removing the deprecation and restoring the original behaviour of +(::UniformScaling, ::Number).

[Keno]

Just to complete the reference cycle the un-deprecation was done in JuliaLang/julia#23923.