[SciPy-user] Problems with io.read_array

[Travis E. Oliphant]

>
> Ok. Fair enough.  My apologies.  I misunderstood the discussion and 
> did _not_ in fact double check myself by running a few tests with my 
> own files.  But it's reasonable for a forum like this one for people 
> to post their own opinions based on the previous discussion.  In most 
> cases (considering folks here are fairly competent by and large) no 
> misunderstandings are generated and one can get various viewpoints on 
> one issue. 


I'm sorry for giving the wrong impression.  Perhaps it has just been a 
bad day.   I don't want to turn away people from giving their opinions. 
  You make very valid points here.

I don't mean to turn away comments at all.  Of course discussion helps 
code development and is often the key issue to get things resolved.  If 
nothing else, this discussion prompted me to look again at io.read_array 
and I found a couple of bugs that had gone undetected.

So, thank you for the feedback.    I and other developers of SciPy do 
appreciate the effort people put in to testing code that may have bugs 
and then giving their feedback.    

I agree that it takes too much time to check all code references.   It 
even takes time for me,  I had forgotten that io.read_array does 
white-space field-separation by default and had to take the time to 
verify that.  If I had remembered that, I could have saved a lot of 
typing by just pointing that out and moving on.  

I'm truly sorry if I caused any friction.

>
> Something about this seems to truly have grated you the wrong way.  If 
> anything, it was a harmless misunderstanding which you clarified with 
> your first response.  No need to hammer on people with remarks like 
> the above ('we humans...', '1 cent worth of code...', and others in 
> previous posts).  At least I've never expected that kind of response 
> from this forum. 

I'm sorry for those remarks.  I'm usually very careful in email because 
it is difficult to get the right tone across in your words.  I don't 
mean to  sound condescending at all and when I re-read the words, I 
agree that they were poorely chosen.  If anything I was just trying to 
distance myself from the feelings I was feeling and didn't do a good job 
of it.

It probably just grated me wrong because it's code that I wrote and it 
was being criticized as being worthless (you did make the comment that 
people would just write their own code instead of use this) without any 
real specifics.   Of course, I know understand that you were just saying 
that to illustrate your opinion about how a text-reading facility should 
work and were not attacking.

Again, I'm very happy (and others in scipy are as well) to receive 
criticism and ideas about how to proceed.  Please keep them coming and 
forgive my little sensitivity issue today.

-Travis Oliphant