David M. Cooke wrote: > 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:
If possible, I would prefer a way to pass a value to use and raise the error if no such value is passed rather than hardcode an identity value for min() and max(). -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
