On Mon, Sep 26, 2011 at 6:25 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@pearwood.info> wrote: > While continuity of API might be a good thing, we shouldn't accept a poor > API just for the sake of continuity. I have some criticisms of the linspace > API. [...]
> * I'm not sure that start/end/count is a better API than start/step/count. On this particular one, I think start/end/count *is* better, because in the most common use case the start and end points are given, and the step is somewhat of an afterthought (e.g. how many integration steps, or how many points in the chart). I also keep thinking that numerically, if start and end are given exactly, we should be able to compute the intermediate points within 0.5ULP, whereas it would seem that given start and step our computation for end may be considerably off, if the count is high. Or, maybe what I'm trying to say is, if the user has start/end/count but the API wants start/step/count, after computing step = (end-start) / count, the value of start + count*step might not quite equal to end; whereas if the user has start/step/count but the API wants start/end/count I think there's nothing wrong with computing end = start + step*count. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
