On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 1:51 PM, <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 3:40 PM, Robert Kern <[email protected]> > wrote: > > On Thu, Apr 25, 2013 at 8:21 PM, Andrew Giessel > > <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I respect this opinion. However (and maybe this is legacy), while > reading > >> through the numeric.py source file, I was surprised at how short many > of the > >> functions are, generally. Functions like ones() and zeros() are pretty > >> simple wrappers which call empty() and then copy over values. > > > > Many of these are short, but they do tend to do at least two things > > that someone would otherwise have to do. This really isn't the case > > for iteraxis() and rollaxis(). One can use rollaxis() pretty much > > everywhere you would use iteraxis(), but not vice-versa. > > > >> FWIW, I had used numpy for over two years before realizing that the > default > >> behavior of iterating on a numpy array was to return slices over the > first > >> axis (although, this makes sense because it makes a 1d array like a > list), > >> and I think it is generally left out of any tutorials or guides. > > That definitely sounds like a documentation problem. > I'm using often that it's a python iterator in the first dimension, > and can be used with *args and tuple unpacking. > (I didn't need it with anything else than axis=0 or axis=-1 for matplotlib > IIRC) > > I never used rollaxis, but I have seen it a lot when I was still > reading the nipy source. > > In general, I think that there are already too many aliases in numpy, > or function whether it's not really clear if they are aliases or > something slightly different. > > It took me more than a year to remember what `expand_dims` is called, > (I always tried, add_axis) until I bookmarked it for a while. > > After thinking about it, I'm in favor of this small function. Rollaxis takes a bit of thought and document reading to figure out how to use it, whereas this function covers a common use with an easy to understand API. I'm not completely satisfied with the name, it isn't as memorable as I'd like, but that is a small quibble.
Chuck
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