[Numpy-discussion] Please chime in on proposed methods for arrays

[Travis Oliphant]

One item I have not received a lot of feedback on is the new proposal 
for a greatly increased number of methods on the ndarray.

The current PEP has a listing of all the proposed methods and attributes 
(some more were added after consulting current numarray in more detail 
and looking at all the functions in current Numeric.py)

If a function call essentially involved an arrayobject with some other 
parameters then it was turned into a method.  If it involved two "equal" 
arrays then it was left as a function.  This is a somewhat arbitrary 
convention, and so I am asking for suggestions as to what should be methods.

Should all the ufuncs be methods as well?  I think Konrad suggested 
this.  What is the opinion of others?



The move from functions to methods will mean that some of the function 
calls currently in Numeric.py will be redundant, but I think they should 
stay there for backwards compatibility, (perhaps with a deprecation 
warning...)


A final question: 

I think we need to think carefully about multidimensional indexing so 
that it replaces current usage of take, put, putmask.

For example, how, in numarray would you replace 
take(a,[1,5,10],axis=-2)  if a is a 10x20x30 array?  

Note that in this case take returns a 10x3x30 array  (call it g) with

g[:,0,:] = a[:,1,:]
g[:,1,:] = a[:,5,:]
g[:,2,:] = a[:,10,:]

I submit that a[...,[1,5,10],:] would be an appropriate syntax.    This 
would mean changing the current PEP a bit.

-Travis