[SciPy-dev] MCMC, Kalman Filtering, AI for SciPy?

[Perry Greenfield]

On Sep 30, 2004, at 3:40 AM, eric jones wrote:
> I don't like the replication idea very well.  I think things should 
> live in one place.  Otherwise people will wonder if two functions that 
> are actually the same have different purposes, implementation, etc.
>
I agree with this sentiment. Use the search tool to find out where the 
one "true" item lives,
but don't use aliasing within the package hierarchy.
> I used to love "from xxx import *" and swore it was the right way to 
> handle Numeric, etc. since I few "array" and friends as builtin 
> functions...  I guess I've been hanging out with to many computer 
> scientists lately.  Or perhaps it is the few times where I have 
> wondered "where is function xxx [which is broken] coming from?" and 
> struggled through a large codebase to track it down.  We've had a 
> nasty bug or two where one import * unexpectedly clobbered some 
> functions from a previous import *.  In any case, it is a (seldom 
> broken) policy to never use import * in our code bases at Enthought.  
> It is probably a good idea to apply this same policy to SciPy.  Doing 
> so would partially solve the problem you discuss.
>
This seems like a good idea as well. I don't see anything wrong with 
using
something like:

import numarray as na

to make the code (and particularly expressions) more concise. It still 
prevents the above
mentioned problems.

> Perry