[Python-Dev] PEP 450 adding statistics module

[R. David Murray]

On Thu, 15 Aug 2013 14:10:39 -0400, "Eric V. Smith" <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:
> On 08/15/2013 01:58 PM, Mark Dickinson wrote:
> > On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info
> > <mailto:steve at pearwood.info>> wrote:
> > 
> > 
> >     - Each scheme ended up needing to be a separate function, for ease
> >     of both implementation and testing. So I had four private median
> >     functions, which I put inside a class to act as namespace and avoid
> >     polluting the main namespace. Then I needed a "master function" to
> >     select which of the methods should be called, with all the
> >     additional testing and documentation that entailed.
> > 
> > 
> > That's just an implementation issue, though, and sounds like a minor
> > inconvenience to the implementor rather than anything serious;  I don't
> > think that that should dictate the API that's used.
> > 
> >     - The API doesn't really feel very Pythonic to me. For example, we
> >     write:
> > 
> > 
> > And I guess this is subjective:  conversely, the API you're proposing
> > doesn't feel Pythonic to me. :-)  I'd like the hear the opinion of other
> > python-dev readers.
> 
> I agree with Mark: the proposed median, median.low, etc., doesn't feel
> right. Is there any example of doing this in the stdlib? I suggest just
> median(), median_low(), etc.

I too prefer the median_low naming rather than median.low.  I'm not
sure I can articulate why, but certainly the fact that that latter
isn't used anywhere else in the stdlib that I can think of is
probably a lot of it :)

Perhaps the underlying thought is that we don't use classes pure
function namespaces:  we expect classes to be something more than
that.

--David