[Numpy-discussion] Add ability to disable the autogeneration of the function signature in a ufunc docstring.

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Fri, Mar 15, 2013 at 9:19 PM, Pauli Virtanen <pav at iki.fi> wrote:
> 15.03.2013 22:39, Nathaniel Smith kirjoitti:
> [clip]
>> - Something else...
>
> How about: scrap the automatic signatures altogether, and directly use
> the docstring provided to the ufunc creation function?
>
> I suspect ufuncs are not very widely used in 3rd party code, as it
> requires somewhat tricky messing with the C API. The backwards
> compatibility issue is also just a documentation issue, so nothing drastic.

True enough. I guess a question is how much it bothers us that there
are tons of ufunc arguments that are just not mentioned in the
interpreter docstrings:
  http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/ufuncs.html#optional-keyword-arguments
Obviously not a huge amount of we'd have altered the auto-generation
already to include them :-) But IMHO it would be kind of nice if
?np.add mentioned the existence of things like where= and dtype=...
and if we decide that docstrings ought to mention such things, then
it's going to be a right hassle updating them all by hand every time
some new ufunc feature is added.

-n