On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 3:39 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 6:30 PM, Warren Weckesser > <warren.weckes...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> >> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 12:40 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: >>> >>> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Warren Weckesser >>> <warren.weckes...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> > >>> > On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 9:13 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: >>> >> >>> >> Regarding names: shuffle/permutation is a terrible naming convention >>> >> IMHO and shouldn't be propagated further. We already have a good >>> >> naming convention for inplace-vs-sorted: sort vs. sorted, reverse vs. >>> >> reversed, etc. >>> >> >>> >> So, how about: >>> >> >>> >> scramble + scrambled shuffle individual entries within each >>> >> row/column/..., as in Warren's suggestion. >>> >> >>> >> shuffle + shuffled to do what shuffle, permutation do now (mnemonic: >>> >> these break a 2d array into a bunch of 1d "cards", and then shuffle >>> >> those cards). >>> >> >>> >> permuted remains indefinitely, with the docstring: "Deprecated alias >>> >> for 'shuffled'." >>> > >>> > That sounds good to me. (I might go with 'randomize' instead of >>> > 'scramble', >>> > but that's a second-order decision for the API.) >>> >>> I hesitate to use names like "randomize" because they're less >>> informative than they feel seem -- if asked what this operation does >>> to an array, then it would be natural to say "it randomizes the >>> array". But if told that the random module has a function called >>> randomize, then that's not very informative -- everything in random >>> randomizes something somehow. >> >> I had some similar concerns (hence my original "disarrange"), but >> "randomize" seemed more likely to be found when searching or browsing the >> docs, and while it might be a bit too generic-sounding, it does feel like a >> natural verb for the process. On the other hand, "permute" and "permuted" >> are even more natural and unambiguous. Any objections to those? (The >> existing function is "permutation".) > [...] >> By the way, "permutation" has a feature not yet mentioned here: if the >> argument is an integer 'n', it generates a permutation of arange(n). In >> this case, it acts like matlab's "randperm" function. Unless we replicate >> that in the new function, we shouldn't deprecate "permutation". > > I guess we could do something like: > > permutation(n): > > Return a random permutation on n items. Equivalent to permuted(arange(n)). > > Note: for backwards compatibility, a call like permutation(an_array) > currently returns the same as shuffled(an_array). (This is *not* > equivalent to permuted(an_array).) This functionality is deprecated. > > OTOH "np.random.permute" as a name does have a downside: someday we'll > probably add a function called "np.permute" (for applying a given > permutation in place -- the O(n) algorithm for this is useful and > tricky), and having two functions with the same name and very > different semantics would be pretty confusing.
I like `permute`. That's the one term I'm looking for first. If np.permute does some kind of deterministic permutation or pivoting, then I wouldn't find it confusing if np.random.permute does "random" permutation. (I definitely don't like scrambled, sounds like eggs or cable TV that needs to be unscrambled.) Josef > > -n > > -- > Nathaniel J. Smith > Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh > http://vorpus.org > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org > http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
