[SciPy-dev] [Numpy-discussion] Proposal: scipy.spatial

[Prabhu Ramachandran]

Anne Archibald wrote:
> 2008/9/30 Peter <numpy-discussion at maubp.freeserve.co.uk>:
> I think the profusion of different implementations is an argument for
> including this in scipy. I think it is also an argument for providing
> a standard interface with (at least potentially) several different
> implementations. At the moment, that proposed interface looks like:
[...]
> In the first two cases, missing neighbors are represented with an
> infinite distance and an invalid index. In the last case, distances
> and indices are both either lists (if there's only one query point) or
> object arrays of lists (if there are many query points). If only one
> neighbor is requested, the array does not have a dimension of length 1
> in the which-neighbor position. If (potentially) many neighbors are
> returned, they are sorted by distance, nearest first.
> 
> What do you think of this interface?

This is nice.  How about a keyword argument "sort=True" that lets people 
choose if they want the results sorted by distance or not?  I have seen 
cases where unsorted results are useful.

cheers,
prabhu