[Numpy-discussion] New Indexing Methods Revival #N (subclasses!)

[Nathan Goldbaum]

On Monday, September 5, 2016, Marten van Kerkwijk <m.h.vankerkwijk at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi Sebastian,
>
> It would seem to me that any subclass has to keep up to date with new
> features in ndarray, and while I think ndarray has a responsibility
> not to break backward compatibility, I do not think it has to protect
> against new features possibly not working as expected in subclasses.
> In particular, I think it is overly complicated (and an unnecessary
> maintenance burden) to error out if a subclass has `__getitem__`
> overwritten, but not `oindex`.
>
> For somewhat similar reasons, I'm not too keen on a new
> `__numpy_getitem__` method; I realise it might reduce complexity for
> some ndarray subclasses eventually, but it also is an additional
> maintenance burden. If you really think it is useful, I think it might
> be more helpful to define a new mixin class which provides a version
> of all indexing methods that just call `__numpy_getitem__` if that is
> provided by the class that uses the mixin. I would *not* put it in
> `ndarray` proper.


I disagree that multiple inheritance (i.e. with your proposed mixin and
ndarray) is something that numpy should enshrine in its API for subclasses.
As the maintainer of an ndarray subclass, I'd much rather prefer just to
implement a new duner method that older numpy versions will ignore.


>
> Indeed, the above might even be handier for subclasses, since they can
> choose, if they wish, to implement a similar mixin for older numpy
> versions, so that all the numpy version stuff can be moved to a single
> location. (E.g., I can imagine doing the same for `__numpy_ufunc__`.)
>
> Overall, my sense would be to keep your PR to just implementing the
> various new index methods (which are great -- I still don't really
> like the names, but sadly don't have better suggestions...).
>
> But it might be good if others pipe in here too, in particular those
> maintaining ndarray subclasses!
>
> All the best,
>
> Marten
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