On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 3:28 PM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, Oct 19, 2018 at 4:15 PM Hameer Abbasi <einstein.edison@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi!

On Friday, Oct 19, 2018 at 6:09 PM, Stephan Hoyer <shoyer@gmail.com> wrote:

I don't think it makes much sense to change NumPy's existing usage of asarray() to asanyarray() unless we add subok=True arguments (which default to False). But this ends up cluttering NumPy's public API, which is also undesirable.

Agreed so far.

I'm not sure I agree. "subok" is very unpythonic; the average numpy library function should work fine for a well-behaved subclass (i.e. most things out there except np.matrix).

Masked arrays also tend to break code that's not expecting them (e.g. on a masked array, arr.sum()/arr.size will silently compute some meaningless nonsense instead of the mean, and there are lots of formulas out there that have some similarities with 'mean'). And people do all kinds of weird things in third-party array subclasses.

Obviously we can't remove asanyarray or break existing code that assumes particular numpy functions use asanyarray, but fundamentally asanyarray is just not an API that makes sense or can be supported in a general way, and our overall goal is to get people to gradually transition away from using ndarray subclasses in general. That's why we're doing all this work to make duck arrays work. So extending asanyarray support doesn't seem like a good priority to spend our limited resources on, to me.

-n

Nathaniel J. Smith -- https://vorpus.org