Thanks @hhoppe, you're right, the docstring for mat actually refers to asmatrix.

But that is because mat is simply an alias for asmatrix. mat is defined here:

I haven't dug into the history here, so I don't know why it is done this way. I'd recommend that we deprecate mat, but I don't know if there is interest in that code churn now, because the entire matrix class is destined for deprecation.

Should we just add a note in the docstring about this being an alias, while these are not deprecated?

@hhoppe would you be interested in submitting a pull request for this?

@melissawm @WarrenWeckesser has this been done yet? The it says "Unlike matrix, asmatrix does not make a copy if the input is already a matrix or an ndarray. Equivalent to matrix(data, copy=False)." Should "Equivalent to" be changed to "Alias for"? Also why are there empty lines in the example?

numpy.mat has been removed (see #24376) so this issue is not applicable anymore.

By the way, if you want to always look at the latest version of the docs @linus-md make sure you are looking at the devdocs by selecting "dev" in the upper right-hand corner of the documentation pages. Cheers!