On Fri, May 09, 2008 at 12:53:40PM -0500, Nathan Bell wrote: > True, but scipy.sparse makes fairly limited use of matrix and I have > 386 unittests to tell me what broke. End-users might spend > considerably longer sorting out the problem, particularly if they > don't know what they're looking for. Personally, I would not have > thought a 1.0 -> 1.1 version bump would break something like this. > Yes, we can put caveats in the release notes, but how many > numpy.matrix users read those?
Exact. Don't break existing code, or users will hate you, and eventually stop using your code. In real life, many of the domain-specific libraries still use numeric or numarray. People like to write code, and forget about it for 10 years. If you change APIs they cannot do this. > Alan, I don't fundamentally disagree with your positions on the > deficiencies/quirks of matrices in numpy. However, it's completely > inappropriate to plug one hole while creating others, especially in a > minor release. I suspect that if we surveyed end-users we'd find > that "my code still works" is a much higher priority than "A[0][0] now > does what I expect". +1. Pluging one annoyance to create another one (IMHO worse), and in addition breaking backward compatibility seems utterly wrong to me. Gaël _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
