[SciPy-Dev] adding chkfinite flags to linalg functions

[Bruce Southey]

On 08/26/2011 02:41 PM, Robert Kern wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 14:30, Bruce Southey<bsouthey at gmail.com>  wrote:
>> On 08/26/2011 02:09 PM, Matthew Brett wrote:
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> On Fri, Aug 26, 2011 at 11:45 AM, Bruce Southey<bsouthey at gmail.com>    wrote:
>>>> On 08/26/2011 12:02 PM, Christopher Jordan-Squire wrote:
>>>>> Breaking it into two steps has its own issues associated with it as
>>>>> well. Then the user must verify their own inputs before passing them
>>>>> to scipy linalg methods. If I understand your suggestion correctly.
>>>> That is exactly what your patch is doing because people will misuse that
>>>> argument just because they perceive it as faster.
>>> I object to this objection.
>>>
>>> There's a long tradition of letting people do dangerous things if they
>>> want to.  Here the option is sensibly labeled and it's not the
>>> default.
>> So why not have the patch remove all the calls to asarray_chkfinite()?
> Because we want the *default* to be safe for all inputs. We want to
> *allow* people to avoid those checks when they have extra information
> about the inputs. Adding a flag is a more convenient way to do this
> than any other alternative.
>
You and others are totally ignoring the author has stated (without 
example) that there is a major roadblock when that assumption is wrong.

I am very aware of that many functions will provide something even if 
the input was not correct. So I agree with Matthew about letting people 
live dangerously as the output will tell them that something was wrong. 
That means there should be no need for asarray_chkfinite() here.


Bruce