Alan G Isaac wrote:
I argue that rand and randn should accept a tuple as the first argument. Whether the old behavior is also allowed, I have no opinion. But the numpy-consistent behavior should definitely be allowed. I perhaps wrongly understood Robert to argue that the current behavior of rand and randn is not a wart since i. alternative tuple-accepting functions are available and ii. the suprising behavior is documented. This seems quite wrong to me, and I am farily confident that such an argument would not be offered except in defence of legacy code.
On Sun, 02 Jul 2006, Robert Kern apparently wrote:
i. Yes, you're still misunderstanding my arguments. ii. I'm bloody sick of rehashing it, so I won't be responding further.
Sorry, I should not have said: "not a wart". I perhaps should have instead said: "an acceptable wart", due to issues of backward compatability. At least that's what you implied here: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/numpy-discussion/3150643 And note that you emphasized the availability of the alternative functions here: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/numpy-discussion/3150702 I made the documentation comment based on your action in response to this conversation: adding documentation. You make a claim not an argument when you say: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/numpy-discussion/3150643 *Changing* the API of rand() and randn() doesn't solve any problem. *Removing* them might. Your primary argument against changing the API, as far as I can see, is that allowing *both* the extant behavior and the numpy consistent behavior will result in confusing code. http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/numpy-discussion/3150643 Is this a knock-down argument? I think not. But in any case, I did not argue (above) for the combined behaviors: only for the numpy-consistent behavior. (Or for removing rand and randn, an action which I view as inferior but acceptable, and which you seem---at the link above---willing to consider.) To repeat a point I made before: http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Mail/Message/numpy-discussion/3150728 numpy should take a step so that this question goes away, rather than maintain the status quo and see it crop up continually. (I.e., its recurrence should be understood to signal a problem.) Apologies in advance for any misrepresentations, Alan Isaac