On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:38 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: > On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 5:13 PM, Travis Oliphant <tra...@continuum.io> wrote: >> While namespaces are a really good idea, I'm not a big fan of both "module" >> namespaces and underscore namespaces. It seems pretty redundant to me to >> have pad.pad_mean. >> >> On the other hand, one could argue that pad.mean could be confused with >> calculating the mean of a padded array. So, it seems like the function >> names need to be called something more than just "mean, median, etc." >> Something like padwith_mean, padwith_median, etc. actually makes more sense. >> Or pad.with_mean, pad.with_median. The with_ in this case is not really >> a "namespace" it's an indication of functionality. > > Perhaps it should be > pad(..., mode="mean") > > , mode="" is only a few more characters than _with_, and this would > make it much easier to write functions whose API looks like: > wavelet_decompose(..., pad_mode=....) > > Also it would solve the namespace question :-). > > -- Nathaniel
...And on looking at the pull request for a bit, it would let us combine 10 distinct single-line functions that (with highly redundant docstrings) take up ~600 lines of code. The interfaces are *almost* identical; the exceptions are: -- "reflect" and "symmetric" take and "even"/"odd" argument -- "pad_constant" takes an argument specifying the constant to pad with -- "pad_linear_ramp" takes an argument specifying the end value of the linear ramp The first two can be easily handled by just combining it into the mode, so we have "reflect", "reflect_odd", "symmetric", "symmetric_odd", so that just leaves two mode-specific arguments. I wouldn't feel bad about leaving those in as unused arguments for most modes. We might even want to combine them into a single argument -- normally I'm against such "simplifications", but the semantics really are quite similar. And final advantage: we could later extend this interface to also support mode=user_specified_callable for custom padding modes, since this is basically how the underlying code already works. (Though I'm not quite sure the interface for the individual pad mode functions like _mean and _median is the one we'd want to expose to users.) -- Nathaniel _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
