[SciPy-dev] Deprecating current scipy.stats.var API for 0.7 ?

[Anne Archibald]

2008/6/20 David Cournapeau <david at ar.media.kyoto-u.ac.jp>:

>   This issue keeps coming up, and I would like to start solving it.
> scipy.stats.var, mean and other basic functions do not have the same API
> as numpy (axis = 0 vs None, etc...). What about keeping them for now,
> but deprecating them in 0.7 + putting funcs which are the same as numpy
> with a different name, and removing the old ones in 0.8 ?

Consistency sounds like a good idea to me - though having the same
functions under different names is not much more consistent than
different functions under the same name. But if the functions in
scipy.stats are the same as the functions in numpy, why have them at
all? It seems like they should present some increase in functionality.
We have had a number of requests for versions of mean, std, and var
that are more numerically stable; perhaps these should be the new
ones?

Anne