[Python-Dev] PEP 450 adding statistics module

[Eric V. Smith]

On 8/15/2013 2:24 PM, R. David Murray wrote:
> 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 :)

Actually, there is one place I can think of:
itertools.chain.from_iterable. But I think that was a mistake, too. As a
recent discussion showed, it's not exactly discoverable. The fact that
it's not mentioned in the list of functions at the top of the
documentation doesn't help. And "chain" is documented as a "module
function", and "chain.from_iterable" as a "classmethod" making it all
the more confusing.

I think itertools.combinations and
itertools.combinations_with_replacement is the better example of related
functions that should be followed. Not nested, no special parameters
trying to differentiate them: just two different function names.

-- 
Eric.