Charles R Harris wrote: > > > On 8/29/06, *Tim Hochberg* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>> wrote: > > Charles R Harris wrote: > > Hi, > > > > On 8/29/06, *Tim Hochberg* <[EMAIL PROTECTED] > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>>> > wrote: > > > > > > -0.5 from me if what we're talking about here is having mutating > > methods > > return self rather than None. Chaining stuff is pretty, but > having > > methods that mutate self and return self looks like a source of > > elusive > > bugs to me. > > > > -tim > > > > > > But how is that any worse than the current mutating operators? I > think > > the operating principal is that methods generally work in place, > > functions make copies. The exceptions to this rule need to be noted. > Is that really the case? I was more under the impression that there > wasn't much rhyme nor reason to this. Let's do a quick dir(somearray) > and see what we get (I'll strip out the __XXX__ names): > > 'all', 'any', 'argmax', 'argmin', 'argsort', 'astype', 'base', > 'byteswap', 'choose', 'clip', 'compress', 'conj', 'conjugate', 'copy', > 'ctypes', 'cumprod', 'cumsum', 'data', 'diagonal', 'dtype', 'dump', > 'dumps', 'fill', 'flags', 'flat', 'flatten', 'getfield', 'imag', > 'item', > 'itemsize', 'max', 'mean', 'min', 'nbytes', 'ndim', 'newbyteorder', > 'nonzero', 'prod', 'ptp', 'put', 'putmask', 'ravel', 'real', > 'repeat', > 'reshape', 'resize', 'round', 'searchsorted', 'setfield', 'setflags', > 'shape', 'size', 'sort', 'squeeze', 'std', 'strides', 'sum', > 'swapaxes', > 'take', 'tofile', 'tolist', 'tostring', 'trace', 'transpose', > 'var', 'view' > > > There are certainly many methods where inplace operations make no > sense. But for such things as conjugate and clip I think it should be > preferred. Think of them as analogs of the "+=" operators that allow > memory efficient inplace operations. At the moment there are too few > such operators, IMHO, and that makes it hard to write memory efficient > code when you want to do so. If you need a copy, the functional form > should be the preferred way to go and can easily be implement by > constructions like a.copy().sort(). So let's make this clear; what you are proposing is more that just returning self for more operations. You are proposing changing the meaning of the existing methods to operate in place rather than return new objects. It seems awfully late in the day to be considering this being that we're on the edge of 1.0 and this would could break any existing numpy code that is out there.
Just for grins let's look at the operations that could potentially benefit from being done in place. I think they are: byteswap clip conjugate round sort Of these, clip, conjugate and round support an 'out' argument like that supported by ufunces; byteswap has a boolean argument telling it whether to perform operations in place; and sort always operates in place. Noting that the ufunc-like methods (max, argmax, etc) appear to support the 'out' argument as well although it's not documented for most of them, it looks to me as if the two odd methods are byteswap and sort. The method situation could be made more consistent by swapping the boolean inplace flag in byteswapped with another 'out' argument and also having sort not operate in place by default, but also supply an out argument there. Thus: b = a.sort() # Returns a copy a.sort(out=a) # Sorts a in place a.sort(out=c) # Sorts a into c (probably just equivalent to c = a.sort() in this case since we don't want to rewrite the sort routines) On the whole I think that this would be an improvement, but it may be too late in the day to actually implement it since 1.0 is coming up. There would still be a few methods (fill, put, etc) that modify the array in place and return None, but I haven't heard any complaints about those. -tim > > Hmmm. Without taking too much time to go through these one at a time, > I'm pretty certain that they do not in general mutate things in place. > Probably at least half return, or can return new arrays, sometimes > with > references to the original data, but new shapes, sometimes with > completely new data. In fact, other than sort, I'm not sure which of > these does mutate in place. > > -tim > > > Chuck > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- > Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? > Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier > Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo > http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > _______________________________________________ > Numpy-discussion mailing list > Numpy-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net > https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/numpy-discussion > ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/numpy-discussion
