On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 11:25 AM, Robert Kern <robert.k...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 24, 2011 at 11:13, Christopher Barker <chris.bar...@noaa.gov> > wrote: > > Nathaniel Smith wrote: > > > >> If we think that the memory overhead for floating point types is too > >> high, it would be easy to add a special case where maybe(float) used a > >> distinguished NaN instead of a separate boolean. > > > > That would be pretty cool, though in the past folks have made a good > > argument that even for floats, masks have significant advantages over > > "just using NaN". One might be that you can mask and unmask a value for > > different operations, without losing the value. > > No one is suggesting that the NA approach is universal or replaces > masked arrays. It's better at some things and worse at others. For > many things, usually tables of statistical data, "unmasking" makes no > sense; the missing data is forever missing. For others, particularly > cases where you have gridded data, unmasking and remasking can be > quite useful. They are complementary tools. > It appears to me that views of arrays with masks as in my proposal can support this masking/unmasking semantics without breaking the missing value abstraction. It would be nice for these concepts to fit together well in a single system, anyhow. -Mark > > -- > 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://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion >
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