[SciPy-dev] Arrays as truth values?

[Chris Fonnesbeck]

On 11/10/05, Chris Fonnesbeck <fonnesbeck at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 11/7/05, Travis Oliphant <oliphant at ee.byu.edu> wrote:
> > Steven H. Rogers wrote:
> >
> > >OK.  I can't think of a really good use case for using an array as a truth
> > >value.  I would argue though, that it would make sense for an array of zeros
> > >to be False and an array with any non-zero values to be True.
> > >
> > >
> > I agree this makes sense.  That's why it used to be the default
> > behavior.   But you can already get that behavior with any(a).
> >
> > There will be many though, I'm afraid, who think b or a ought to return
> > element-wise like b | a does.  This is not possible in Python.  Raising
> > an error will at least alert them to the problem which might otherwise
> > give them misleading results.
> >
>
> I'm not quite sure how any() is supposed to work; does it just return
> true if one or more element evaluates to true?
>
> In my current code, I have the following:
>
> if sum(lower>=median or median>=upper): <do something>
>
> which returns a ValueError. What is the best way to detect elements in
> one array that are less than the corresponding element in the other
> without constructing a list comprehension?
>

I think I see the problem. Under scipy_core, this now needs to be:

if sum(lower>=median) or sum(median>=upper): <do something>


--
Chris Fonnesbeck
Atlanta, GA