In your example I would compromise with:

    conf[w] = params[vals[line][column]] - params[vals[column][line]]

or even:

    conf[w] = params[vals[l][c]] - params[vals[c][l]]

if you really want to save a couple of characters. Confusing which loop index is indexing which dimension is far too easy.

The first version was too long to fit on the screen for me. Reading the second I missed the swapping of `i` and `j` -- only noticing it when I went back to the first version to figure out which parts of line I would assign to something if I were to rewrite the code.