2008/4/25 Anne Archibald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > > The agreement was:
Clearly that was only the agreement in my mind. I apologise if I jumped the gun. > > a) That x[0][0] should be equal to x[0,0] and > > b) That x[0,:] should be equal to x[0] (as for ndarrays) > > > > This breaks as little functionality as possible, at the cost of one > > (instead of two) API changes. > > Hold on. There has definitely been some confusion here. This is not > what I thought I was suggesting, or what Alan thought he was > suggesting. I do not think special-casing matrices for which one > dimension happens to be one is a good idea at all, even temporarily. > This is the kind of thing that drives users crazy. Apparently, not having x[0][0] == x[0,0] drives them even crazier :) I was trying to satisfy Alan's request without breaking the API in more than one place. The whole idea of matrices was that you always work with 2-dimensional arrays, even when you just extract a row. Unless you have a proper hierarchical container (as illustrated in the other patch I sent), returning a 1D array breaks at least some expectation. If that's what the matrix users want, though, then we should change it. > My suggested stopgap fix was to make x[0] return a 1D *array*; I feel > that this will result in less special-casing. In fact I wasn't aware > that anyone had proposed the fix you implemented. Can we change the > stopgap solution? Yes, of course. NumPy is a community project, after all. > > We should now discuss the proposals on the table, choose a good one, > > and implement all the API changes necessary for 1.2 or 2. It's a pity > > we have to change the API again, but the current situation is not > > tenable. > > Yes, well, it really looks unlikely we will be able to agree on what > the correct solution is before 1.1, so I would like to have something > non-broken for that release. Unless we agree on something, and soon, that won't happen. Your workaround would break x[0] == x[0,:], so we're just swapping one set of broken functionality for another. I'm starting to see Chris Barker's point; allowing x[0] is causing more problems than it is worth. On the other hand, how would you index into a vector (as in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_(spatial)) without it? Regards Stéfan _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
