[Numpy-discussion] numpy release

[Anne Archibald]

On 25/04/2008, Stéfan van der Walt <stefan at sun.ac.za> wrote:
> 2008/4/25 Alan G Isaac <aisaac at american.edu>:
>
> >  I must have misunderstood:
>  >  I thought the agreement was to
>  >  provisionally return a 1d array for x[0],
>  >  while we hashed through the other proposals.
>
> The agreement was:
>
>  a) That x[0][0] should be equal to x[0,0] and
>  b) That x[0,:] should be equal to x[0] (as for ndarrays)
>
>  This breaks as little functionality as possible, at the cost of one
>  (instead of two) API changes.

Hold on. There has definitely been some confusion here. This is not
what I thought I was suggesting, or what Alan thought he was
suggesting. I do not think special-casing matrices for which one
dimension happens to be one is a good idea at all, even temporarily.
This is the kind of thing that drives users crazy.

My suggested stopgap fix was to make x[0] return a 1D *array*; I feel
that this will result in less special-casing. In fact I wasn't aware
that anyone had proposed the fix you implemented. Can we change the
stopgap solution?

>  We should now discuss the proposals on the table, choose a good one,
>  and implement all the API changes necessary for 1.2 or 2.  It's a pity
>  we have to change the API again, but the current situation is not
>  tenable.

Yes, well, it really looks unlikely we will be able to agree on what
the correct solution is before 1.1, so I would like to have something
non-broken for that release.

Anne