On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 7:44 PM, Allan Haldane <allanhaldane@gmail.com> wrote:

I suggest that if we want to allow either means over fields, or conversion of a n-D structured array to an n+1-D regular ndarray, we should add a dedicated function to do so in numpy.lib.recfunctions
which does not depend on the binary representation of the array.

IIUC, the core use-case of structured dtypes is binary compatibility with external systems (arrays of C structs, mostly) -- at least that's how I use them :-)

In which case, "conversion of a n-D structured array to an n+1-D regular ndarray" is an important feature -- actually even more important if you don't use recarrays

So yes, let's have a utility to make that easy.

as for recarrays -- are we that far from having them be robust and useful? in which case, why not keep them around, fix the few issues, but explicitly not try to extend them into more dataframe-like domains

-CHB

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
Oceanographer

Emergency Response Division
NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959   voice
7600 Sand Point Way NE   (206) 526-6329   fax
Seattle, WA 98115   (206) 526-6317   main reception

Chris.Barker@noaa.gov