Unintuitive Julia result: selecting a row from a matrix

[jling]

Why column major?

As I understand it, it was mainly historical precedent, driven by the fact that most linear-algebra libraries (LAPACK etc.) are column-major (because Fortran is column-major, and hence Matlab is column-major), though it would have been possible to work around this with judicious use of transposition. It’s been discussed before, e.g. https://groups.google.com/d/msg/julia-users/GkvDunqE0ww/2gIDmA5cAAAJ

julia> x[1,:] # this returns a Vector, which is a column

julia> x[1,:]' # this traspose the Vector into a row-vector