[Numpy-discussion] Warnings in numpy.ma.test()

[Ryan May]

On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Christopher Barker
<Chris.Barker at noaa.gov> wrote:
> Gael Varoquaux wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 12:12:10PM -0700, Christopher Barker wrote:
>>> sure -- that's kind of my point -- if EVERY numpy array were
>>> (potentially) masked, then folks would write code to deal with them
>>> appropriately.
>>
>> That's pretty much saying: "I have a complicated problem and I want every
>> one else to have to deal with the full complexity of it, even if they
>> have a simple problem".
>
> Well -- I did say it was a fantasy...
>
> But I disagree -- having invalid data is a very common case. What we
> have now is a situation where we have two parallel systems, masked
> arrays and regular arrays. Each time someone does something new with
> masked arrays, they often find another missing feature, and have to
> solve that. Also, the fact that masked arrays are tacked on means that
> performance suffers.

Case in point, I just found a bug in np.gradient where it forces the
output to be an ndarray.
(http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/1435).  Easy fix that doesn't
actually require any special casing for masked arrays, just making
sure to use the proper function to create a new array of the same
subclass as the input.  However, now for any place that I can't patch
I have to use a custom function until a fixed numpy is released.

Maybe universal support for masked arrays (and masking invalid points)
is a pipe dream, but every function in numpy should IMO deal properly
with subclasses of ndarray.

Ryan

-- 
Ryan May
Graduate Research Assistant
School of Meteorology
University of Oklahoma