[SciPy-User] scipy.optimize named argument inconsistency

[Matthew Newville]

Hi, 

On Friday, September 2, 2011 1:31:46 PM UTC-5, Denis Laxalde wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> (I'm resurrecting an old post.)
>
> On Thu, 27 Jan 2011 18:54:39 +0800, Ralf Gommers wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 12:41 AM, Joon Ro <joon... at gmail.com> wrote:
> > > I just found that for some functions such as fmin_bfgs, the argument 
> name
> > > for the objective function to be minimized is f, and for others such as
> > > fmin, it is func.
> > > I was wondering if this was intended, because I think it would be 
> better to
> > > have consistent argument names across those functions.
> > >
> > 
> > It's unlikely that that was intentional. A patch would be welcome. "func"
> > looks better to me than "f" or "F".
>
> There are still several inconsistencies in input or output of functions
> in the optimize package. For instance, for input parameters the Jacobian
> is sometimes name 'fprime' or 'Dfun', tolerances can be 'xtol' or
> 'x_tol', etc. Outputs might be returned in a different order, e.g.,
> fsolve returns 'x, infodict, ier, mesg' whereas leastsq returns 'x,
> cov_x, infodict, mesg, ier'. Some functions make use of the infodict
> output whereas some return the same data individually. etc.
>
> If you still believe (as I do) that consistency of optimize
> functions should be improved, I can work on it. Let me know
>
Also +1.

I would add that the call signatures and return values for the user-supplied 
function to minimize should be made consistent too.  Currently, some 
functions (leastsq) requires the return value to be an array, while others 
(anneal and fmin_l_bfgs_b) require a scalar (sum-of-squares of residual).    
That seems like a serious impediment to changing algorithms.   

--Matt Newville
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