Computing outer products

The outer product of two arrays can be defined as follows:

def outer_prod op A B =
  map (\a -> map (\b -> a `op` b) B) A

This definition is parameterised over the multiplication operator. This allows us to obtain the “standard” outer product:

let std_outer_prod = outer_prod (f64.*)

> std_outer_prod [1.0,2.0,3.0] [4.0,5.0,6.0]

[[4.0f64, 5.0f64, 6.0f64],
[8.0f64, 10.0f64, 12.0f64],
[12.0f64, 15.0f64, 18.0f64]]

But we can also use outer_prod to define matrix multiplication:

def dotprod A B =
  f64.sum (map2 (*) A B)

def matmul A B =
  outer_prod dotprod A (transpose B)

> matmul [[1.0,2.0],[3.0,4.0],[5.0,6.0]]
         [[7.0,8.0,9.0],[10.0,11.0,12.0]]

[[27.0f64, 30.0f64, 33.0f64],
[61.0f64, 68.0f64, 75.0f64],
[95.0f64, 106.0f64, 117.0f64]]