[Numpy-discussion] NA masks in the next numpy release?

[Stéfan van der Walt]

On Fri, Oct 28, 2011 at 11:16 AM, Benjamin Root <ben.root at ou.edu> wrote:
> this by making missing data front-and-center.  However, my belief is that
> Mark's approach is easier to comprehend and is cleaner.  Cleaner features
> means that it is more likely to be used.

Cleaner features may be easier to adopt, but whether they are used or
not depends on whether they address the problem in hand.  The
implementation as it stands essentially gives us a faster and more
integrated version of numpy.ma; but it has become clear from this
conversation that such an approach overlooks a very common subset of
masked-related problems.

We should be  concerned about memory use; we often don't have too much
of it, and accessing it is slow.

Would it be workable to store 8 mask bits per byte instead?  I don't
think it should impact on the speed much, and we can always generate a
full mask for the user on request.

Regards
Stéfan