On Mon, May 14, 2007 at 12:38:58PM -0500, Nick Fotopoulos wrote: > Dear all, > > I find myself frequently wanting to take the max of an array that > might have zero length. If it is zero length, it throws an exception, > when I would like to gracefully substitute my own value. For example, > one solution with lists is to do max(possibly_empty_list + > [minimum_value]), but it seems clunky to do a similar trick with > arrays and concatenate or to use a try: except: block. What do other > people do? If there's no good idiom, would it be possible to add > kwargs like default_value and/or minimum_value?
What about if maximum returned negative infinity (for floats) or the minimum int? That would make maximum act like sum and product, where the identity for those functions is returned: In [2]: sum([]) Out[2]: 0.0 In [3]: product([]) Out[3]: 1.0 -- |>|\/|< /--------------------------------------------------------------------------\ |David M. Cooke http://arbutus.physics.mcmaster.ca/dmc/ |[EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
