At the nipy sprint in Paris, we have been having a discussion about methods modifying inplace and returning a view, or returning a copy.
The main issue is with ravel that tries to keep a view, but that obviously has to do a copy sometimes. (Is ravel the only place where this behavior can happen ?). We came up with the following scenario: Mrs Jane is an experienced Python developper, working with less experienced developpers. She has developped a set of functions to process data that assume they can use the ravel method returning a view. One day another programmes feeds it new kind of data. The functions work, but return something wrong. We (Stefan van der Walt, Matthew Brett and I) are suggesting that it would be a good idea to add a keyword to the ravel method so that it raises an exception if it cannot return a view. Stefan is proposing to implement it. What do people think about this? Should Stefan go ahead? Cheers, Gaël _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
