You don't. I wrote this for me so I don't care.
You are right that .* sounds like a dot product but since multiplication is not the only operator that can be used component wise it makes sense. You can e.g. use x.^2 on a matrix or divide each component by using ./

I like Python but it doesn't support matrices if you don't add NumPy and there's still a restriction on precision which applies to all calcs I know so far. It makes performing big matrix operations a lot slower but I can live with that as long as the results are as precise as I need them.