[SciPy-dev] draft: NumPy User Guide introduction

[Charles R Harris]

2009/8/20 Stéfan van der Walt <stefan at sun.ac.za>

> 2009/8/20 David Goldsmith <d_l_goldsmith at yahoo.com>:
> >> > of arr.* methods (maybe others differ with me on this
> >> point?).
> >>
> >> From an editor's perspective, I would be neutral. The
> >> author of an
> >> example should use whatever they feel gets their point
> >> across best.
> >> Editors should leave that choice alone.
> >>
> >
> > However, I'm curious to hear Stefan's reasons/reasoning?
>
> I guess I should have said "others *will* differ with me on this point" :-)
>
> I like the idea of an ndarray being a concise description of bytes in
> memory.  At the moment, we have a couple of "special" methods attached
> to it, but we could just as well have added fewer or more, and
> personally I'd have preferred none.
>

Curiously, none was the choice made for the original numeric, although none
translated to about three (IIRC) in practice. I believe numarray introduced
the systematic use of methods in preference to functions and this was
carried over to numpy. Different folks have different preferences in that
regard. I'm basically indifferent to the choice at the user level, but for
maintainence and development I think that functions make it easier to add
functionality without bloating the ndarray object.  And figuring out what
all the desireable methods are up front is a difficult exercise in
prospective design.

Chuck
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