[Numpy-discussion] Some missing keyword argument support fixed in CVS

[Travis Oliphant]

On Mon, 2002-06-10 at 19:55, Scott Ransom wrote:
> I have to admit that I agree with all of what Eric has to say
> here -- even if it does cause some code breakage (I'm certainly
> willing to do some maintenance on my code/modules that are
> floating here and there so long as things continue to improve
> with the language as a whole).

I'm generally of the same opinion.

> 
> I do think consistency is a very important aspect of getting
> Numeric/Numarray accepted by a larger user base (and believe
> me, my colaborators are probably sick of my Numeric Python
> evangelism (but I like to think also a bit jealous of my NumPy
> usage as they continue struggling with one-off C and Fortran
> routines...)).
> 

Another important factor is the support libraries.  I know that
something like Simulink (Matlab) is important to many of my colleagues
in engineering.  Simulink is the Mathworks version of visual programming
which lets the user create a circuit visually which is then processed. 

I believe there was a good start to this sort of thing presented at the
last Python Conference which was very encouraging. 

Other colleagues require something like a compiler to get C-code which
will compile on a DSP board from a script and/or design session.    I
believe something like this would be very beneficial.

> Another example of a glaring inconsistency in the current
> implementation is this little number that has been bugging me
> for awhile:
> 
> >>> arange(10, typecode='d')
> array([ 0.,  1.,  2.,  3.,  4.,  5.,  6.,  7.,  8.,  9.])
> >>> ones(10, typecode='d')
> array([ 1.,  1.,  1.,  1.,  1.,  1.,  1.,  1.,  1.,  1.])
> >>> zeros(10, typecode='d')
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
> TypeError: an integer is required
> >>> zeros(10, 'd')
> array([ 0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  0.,  0.])
>   

This is now fixed in cvs, along with other keyword problems.  

The ufunc methods reduce and accumulate also now take a keyword argument
in CVS. 

-Travis