Alexander Schmolck wrote: > Robert Kern <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > >> If possible, I would prefer a way to pass a value to use and raise the error >> if >> no such value is passed rather than hardcode an identity value for min() and >> max(). > > What's wrong with inf? I'm not sure integer reductions should have > max/min-ints as identity values (because this could lead to nasty bugs when > implicit dtype promotions are involved), but I can't see any problems > resulting from +/-inf.
0 and 1 exist in both integer and floating point versions. +/-inf don't. A hardcoded identity value should be consistent across all uses, not changing depending on the type (and we shouldn't use +/-inf for integer arrays, either). There are also times when I have constraints on the domain of the inputs. For example, I might be dealing with arrays that should only have positive numbers. If I call max() on the arrays, I might want the result for the empty one to be 0, not -inf. Besides, being able to specify what value to use to start the reduction is a generally useful feature regardless. There have been several times in the past week, even, when I wished we had that capability. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
