[Numpy-discussion] Release of 1.0b5 this weekend

[Tim Hochberg]

Charles R Harris wrote:
>
>
> On 8/29/06, *Tim Hochberg* <tim.hochberg at ieee.org 
> <mailto:tim.hochberg at ieee.org>> wrote:
>
>     Charles R Harris wrote:
>     > Hi,
>     >
>     > On 8/29/06, *Tim Hochberg* <tim.hochberg at ieee.org
>     <mailto:tim.hochberg at ieee.org>
>     > <mailto:tim.hochberg at ieee.org <mailto:tim.hochberg at ieee.org>>>
>     wrote:
>     >
>     >
>     >     -0.5 from me if what we're talking about here is having mutating
>     >     methods
>     >     return self rather than None. Chaining stuff is pretty, but
>     having
>     >     methods that mutate self and return self looks like a source of
>     >     elusive
>     >     bugs to me.
>     >
>     >     -tim
>     >
>     >
>     > But how is that any worse than the current mutating operators? I
>     think
>     > the operating principal is that methods generally work in place,
>     > functions make copies. The exceptions to this rule need to be noted.
>     Is that really the case? I was more under the impression that there
>     wasn't much rhyme nor reason to this. Let's do a quick dir(somearray)
>     and see what we get (I'll strip out the __XXX__ names):
>
>     'all', 'any', 'argmax', 'argmin', 'argsort', 'astype', 'base',
>     'byteswap', 'choose', 'clip', 'compress', 'conj', 'conjugate', 'copy',
>     'ctypes', 'cumprod', 'cumsum', 'data', 'diagonal', 'dtype', 'dump',
>     'dumps', 'fill', 'flags', 'flat', 'flatten', 'getfield', 'imag',
>     'item',
>     'itemsize', 'max', 'mean', 'min', 'nbytes', 'ndim', 'newbyteorder',
>     'nonzero', 'prod', 'ptp', 'put', 'putmask', 'ravel', 'real',
>     'repeat',
>     'reshape', 'resize', 'round', 'searchsorted', 'setfield', 'setflags',
>     'shape', 'size', 'sort', 'squeeze', 'std', 'strides', 'sum',
>     'swapaxes',
>     'take', 'tofile', 'tolist', 'tostring', 'trace', 'transpose',
>     'var', 'view' 
>
>
> There are certainly many methods where inplace operations make no 
> sense. But for such things as conjugate and clip I think it should be 
> preferred. Think of them as analogs of the "+=" operators that allow 
> memory efficient inplace operations. At the moment there are too few 
> such operators, IMHO, and that makes it hard to write memory efficient 
> code when you want to do so. If you need a copy, the functional form 
> should be the preferred way to go and can easily be implement by 
> constructions like a.copy().sort().
So let's make this clear; what you are proposing is more that just 
returning self for more operations. You are proposing changing the 
meaning of the existing methods to operate in place rather than return 
new objects. It seems awfully late in the day to be considering this 
being that we're on the edge of 1.0 and this would could break any 
existing numpy code that is out there.

Just for grins let's look at the operations that could potentially 
benefit from being done in place. I think they are:
   byteswap
   clip
   conjugate
   round
   sort
   
Of these,  clip, conjugate and round support an 'out' argument like that 
supported by ufunces;  byteswap has a boolean argument telling it 
whether to perform operations in place; and sort always operates in 
place. Noting that the ufunc-like methods (max, argmax, etc) appear to 
support the 'out' argument as well although it's not documented for most 
of them, it looks to me as if the two odd methods are byteswap and sort. 
The method situation could be made more consistent by swapping the 
boolean inplace flag in byteswapped with another 'out' argument and also 
having sort not operate in place by default, but also supply an out 
argument there. Thus:

b = a.sort()   # Returns a copy
a.sort(out=a) # Sorts a in place
a.sort(out=c) # Sorts a into c (probably just equivalent to c = a.sort() 
in this case since we don't want to rewrite the sort routines)

On the whole I think that this would be an improvement, but it may be 
too late in the day to actually implement it since 1.0 is coming up. 
There would still be a few methods (fill, put, etc) that modify the 
array in place and return None, but I haven't heard any complaints about 
those.


-tim

>
>     Hmmm. Without taking too much time to go through these one at a time,
>     I'm pretty certain that they do not in general mutate things in place.
>     Probably at least half return, or can return new arrays, sometimes
>     with
>     references to the original data, but new shapes, sometimes with
>     completely new data. In fact, other than sort, I'm not sure which of
>     these does mutate in place.
>
>     -tim
>
>
> Chuck
>
>
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