On Fri, Jul 1, 2011 at 1:46 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn < [email protected]> wrote:
> I propose a simple idea *for the long term* for generalizing Mark's > proposal, that I hope may perhaps put some people behind Mark's concrete > proposal in the short term. > > If key feature missing in Mark's proposal is the ability to distinguish > between different reason for NA-ness; IGNORE vs. NA. However, one could > conceive wanting to track a whole host of reasons: > > homework_grades = np.asarray([2, 3, 1, EATEN_BY_DOG, 5, SICK, 2, TOO_LAZY]) > > Wouldn't it be a shame to put a lot of work into NA, but then have users > to still keep a seperate "shadow-array" for stuff like this? > > a) In this case the generality of Mark's proposal seems justified and > less confusing to teach newcomers (?) > > b) Since Mark's proposal seems to generalize well to many NAs (there's 8 > bits in the mask, and millions of available NaN-s in floating point), if > people agreed to this one could leave it for later and just go on with > the proposed idea. > > Exactly so. > I don't think we should scetch out the above in more detail now, I don't > want to distract, I just thought it something to consider to resolve the > current situation... > > The important thing is to have a working version to play with, and then see how it would be useful to extend it. I think Mark's framework wouldn't require a massive rewrite to add this sort of functionality, most of the infrastructure would probably remain the same. Chuck
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