[Numpy-discussion] Response to PEP suggestions

[Travis Oliphant]

> Ick, that's horrible. Functions that sometimes copy and sometimes 
> don't are generally bad news IMO. This is just a way to introduce 
> nasty, invisible bugs. The exceptions are things like asarray that are 
> explicit about their variable behaviour.
>
> I'd be much happier if flat never made copies, but always worked by 
> some sort of deep juju, while ravel always made copies.


I tend to agree (though) there is precedence for "return a copy only if 
you have to" at least on the C-level.

What I suggest is that attributes never return copies while methods 
return copies when necessary.

In that vein, I am proposing making X.flat an array iterator  and 
allowing array iterators to be indexed and set as if they were 1-d 
arrays with the underlying array being changed.  This is actually an 
easy change with the current code base.  Will it break any code?  

There maybe some X.flats that need to be changed to ravel.  But it seems 
like a really good idea.

-Travis