On 11/11/06, Tim Hochberg <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Robert Kern wrote:
> Keith Goodman wrote:
>
>> How about a nanmin() function?
>>
>
> Already there.
>
> In [2]: nanmin?
> Type:           function
> Base Class:     <type 'function'>
> Namespace:      Interactive
> File:
> /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.5/lib/python2.5/site-packages/numpy-1.0.1.dev3432-py2.5-macosx-10.4-i386.egg/numpy/lib/function_base.py
> Definition:     nanmin(a, axis=None)
> Docstring:
>     Find the minimium over the given axis, ignoring NaNs.
>
>
Bah! That seems excessive. If I was king of the world one of the many
things that I would stuff into a submodule is all the stuff relating to
special values (nan, inf, isnan, isinf, namin, nanmax, nansum,
nanargmax, nanargmin, nan_to_num, infty,  isneginf, isposinf and
probably some others that I'm missing). First, these are mostly clutter
in the base namespace. Not only would it make the main namespace easier
to navigate in (although there's much clean up that would have to be
done before it would be anything approaching easy to navigate). Second,
for those who actually do need them, they'd be easier to find if they
were all grouped together -- Keith for example would almost certainly
have immediately found nanmin. Third, and this is perhaps a matter of
opinion, there seems to be a sudden urge to abuse NaNs. Perhaps if they
were shunted a bit off to the side, this temptation would be lifted.

Curmudgeonly yours,

Oh yes. And let's reserve a bit of abuse for whoever mixed up the nans with the rest. I mean, the infs and such actually make some sense as numbers, but nans are, well, nans. So it would have been nice to enable everything *except* nans, and have an errorflag set whenever the latter turned up.  Or if folks just have to have nans, make them compare less than anything else. If isnan were fast and easy one could use LT(a,b) := isnan(a) || a < b.

Chuck


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