On 07/07/2011 07:51 AM, Chris Barker wrote: > On 7/6/11 11:57 AM, Mark Wiebe wrote: >> On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 1:25 PM, Christopher Barker > >> Is this really true? if you use a bitpattern for IGNORE, haven't you >> just lost the ability to get the original value back if you want to stop >> ignoring it? Maybe that's not inherent to what an IGNORE means, but it >> seems pretty key to me. >> >> What do you think of renaming IGNORE to SKIP? > > This isn't a semantics issue -- IGNORE is fine. > > What I'm getting at is that we need a word (and code) for: > > "ignore for now, but I might want to use it later"
Wouldn't that be IGNORE+MASK? There's (IGNORE, NA), and (MASK, BITPATTERN), with four combinations: IGNORE+MASK: "ignore for now, but I might want to use it later" NA+MASK: "treat as NA for now, but I might change my mind about that later" [1] IGNORE+BITPATTERN: Simply insert a value in an array that is 0 for addition and 1 for multiplication. IGNORE+BITPATTERN: R's NA. [1] Example on NA+MASK: Temporarily flag something as an invalid outlier to check what effect that has on final estimates. The statistical method one is using may do something different with NA data (beyond what IGNORE does), you may not know exactly what it does, just that the docs says "support NA's gracefully" and that you temporarily want to flag some outliers as such when calling that function. Dag Sverre _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list [email protected] http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
