On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 6:30 PM, Warren Weckesser <warren.weckes...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 12:40 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: >> >> On Thu, Oct 16, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Warren Weckesser >> <warren.weckes...@gmail.com> wrote: >> > >> > On Sun, Oct 12, 2014 at 9:13 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote: >> >> >> >> Regarding names: shuffle/permutation is a terrible naming convention >> >> IMHO and shouldn't be propagated further. We already have a good >> >> naming convention for inplace-vs-sorted: sort vs. sorted, reverse vs. >> >> reversed, etc. >> >> >> >> So, how about: >> >> >> >> scramble + scrambled shuffle individual entries within each >> >> row/column/..., as in Warren's suggestion. >> >> >> >> shuffle + shuffled to do what shuffle, permutation do now (mnemonic: >> >> these break a 2d array into a bunch of 1d "cards", and then shuffle >> >> those cards). >> >> >> >> permuted remains indefinitely, with the docstring: "Deprecated alias >> >> for 'shuffled'." >> > >> > That sounds good to me. (I might go with 'randomize' instead of >> > 'scramble', >> > but that's a second-order decision for the API.) >> >> I hesitate to use names like "randomize" because they're less >> informative than they feel seem -- if asked what this operation does >> to an array, then it would be natural to say "it randomizes the >> array". But if told that the random module has a function called >> randomize, then that's not very informative -- everything in random >> randomizes something somehow. > > I had some similar concerns (hence my original "disarrange"), but > "randomize" seemed more likely to be found when searching or browsing the > docs, and while it might be a bit too generic-sounding, it does feel like a > natural verb for the process. On the other hand, "permute" and "permuted" > are even more natural and unambiguous. Any objections to those? (The > existing function is "permutation".) [...] > By the way, "permutation" has a feature not yet mentioned here: if the > argument is an integer 'n', it generates a permutation of arange(n). In > this case, it acts like matlab's "randperm" function. Unless we replicate > that in the new function, we shouldn't deprecate "permutation".
I guess we could do something like: permutation(n): Return a random permutation on n items. Equivalent to permuted(arange(n)). Note: for backwards compatibility, a call like permutation(an_array) currently returns the same as shuffled(an_array). (This is *not* equivalent to permuted(an_array).) This functionality is deprecated. OTOH "np.random.permute" as a name does have a downside: someday we'll probably add a function called "np.permute" (for applying a given permutation in place -- the O(n) algorithm for this is useful and tricky), and having two functions with the same name and very different semantics would be pretty confusing. -n -- Nathaniel J. Smith Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh http://vorpus.org _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
