[Python-ideas] statistics module in Python3.4

[Oscar Benjamin]

On 1 February 2014 20:10, Wolfgang Maier
<wolfgang.maier at biologie.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
> Greg Ewing <greg.ewing at ...> writes:
>
>>
>> Wolfgang Maier wrote:
>> > Mappings may be an excellent way of specifying frequencies and weights in an
>> > elegant way.
>>
>> That may be, but I think I'd rather have a separate
>> function, or a mode argument, explicitly indicating
>> that this is what you want. Detecting whether something
>> is a mapping in a duck-typed way is dodgy in general.
>>
>
> There should be nothing dodgy about this with the abstract base class Mapping.

I agree with Greg about this. I dislike APIs that try to be too clever
about accepting different types of input. The mode() function is
clearly intended to accept an iterable not a Counter and I consider it
a bug that it does. It can be fixed to treat a Counter as an iterable
by changing the _counts function to do

    collections.Counter(data)

to

    collections.Counter(iter(data))

If you want the option for doing statistics with Counter style data
formats then they should be invoked explicitly as Greg says.


Oscar