On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 8:50 AM, Skipper Seabold <jsseab...@gmail.com>wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 10:43 AM, Till Stensitzki <mail.t...@gmx.de> > wrote: > > > > First, sorry that i didnt search for an old thread, but because i > disagree with > > conclusion i would at least address my reason: > > > >> I don't like > >> np.abs(arr).max() > >> because I have to concentrate to much on the braces, especially if arr > >> is a calculation > > > > This exactly, adding an abs into an old expression is always a little > annoyance > > due to the parenthesis. The argument that np.abs() also works is true for > > (almost?) every other method. The fact that so many methods already > exists, > > especially for most of the commonly used functions (min, max, dot, mean, > std, > > argmin, argmax, conj, T) makes me missing abs. Of course, if one would > redesign > > the api, one would drop most methods (i am looking at you ptp and > byteswap). But > > the objected is already cluttered and adding abs is imo logical > application of > > "practicality beats purity". > > > > I tend to agree here. The situation isn't all that dire for the number of > methods in an array. No scrolling at reasonably small terminal sizes. > > [~/] > [3]: x. > x.T x.copy x.getfield x.put x.std > x.all x.ctypes x.imag x.ravel x.strides > x.any x.cumprod x.item x.real x.sum > x.argmax x.cumsum x.itemset x.repeat x.swapaxes > x.argmin x.data x.itemsize x.reshape x.take > x.argsort x.diagonal x.max x.resize x.tofile > x.astype x.dot x.mean x.round x.tolist > x.base x.dtype x.min x.searchsorted x.tostring > x.byteswap x.dump x.nbytes x.setfield x.trace > x.choose x.dumps x.ndim x.setflags x.transpose > x.clip x.fill x.newbyteorder x.shape x.var > x.compress x.flags x.nonzero x.size x.view > x.conj x.flat x.prod x.sort > x.conjugate x.flatten x.ptp x.squeeze > > > I find myself typing things like > > arr.abs() > > and > > arr.unique() > > quite often. > > Somehow, this reminds me of I. N. Hersteins book, Topics in Algebra<http://tinyurl.com/apoerwn>, where he did function composition left-to-right instead of right-to-left. >From a practical reading and typing point of view, left-to-right makes sense, to add a new function you don't need to go way back to the beginning of a line and you don't need to read right-to-left to see what is going on. However, the line eventually gets too long, line breaks are inconvenient, and you eventually forget what was at the beginning. I think short left-to-right sequences are very nice. OTOH, one call/line is a bit like left-to-right, only up-to-down, and there is no right margin, but you do save the output generated on the previous line. Herstein's attempt to revolutionise old algebraic habits never caught on. But it was a bold attempt ;) Chuck
_______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
