On Wed, Mar 19, 2014 at 7:45 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
Okay, I wrote a little script [1] to scan Python source files look for things like 'dot(a, dot(b, c))' or 'dot(dot(a, b), c)', or the ndarray.dot method equivalents. So what we get out is:
- a count of how many 'dot' calls there are
- a count of how often we see left-associative nestings: dot(dot(a, b), c)
- a count of how often we see right-associative nestings: dot(a, dot(b, c))

Running it on a bunch of projects, I get:

| project      | dots | left | right | right/left |
|--------------+------+------+-------+------------|
| scipy        |  796 |   53 |    27 |       0.51 |
| nipy         |  275 |    3 |    19 |       6.33 |
| scikit-learn |  472 |   11 |    10 |       0.91 |
| statsmodels  |  803 |   46 |    38 |       0.83 |
| astropy      |   17 |    0 |     0 |        nan |
| scikit-image |   15 |    1 |     0 |       0.00 |
|--------------+------+------+-------+------------|
| total        | 2378 |  114 |    94 |       0.82 |


Another way to visualize this, converting each contiguous "chain" of calls to np.dot into a parenthesized expression, and then counting how often we see each pattern.

      1943  (_ @ _)
       100  ((_ @ _) @ _) # left
        86  (_ @ (_ @ _)) # right
         2  (_ @ ((_ @ _) @ _))
         2  (((_ @ _) @ _) @ _) # left
         1  ((_ @ (_ @ _)) @ _)
         1  ((_ @ _) @ (_ @ _))
         1  (((_ @ _) @ _) @ (_ @ _))
         1  ((_ @ ((_ @ _) @ _)) @ _)
         1  ((_ @ _) @ (_ @ (_ @ _)))

(This is pooling scipy/nipy/scikit-learn/statsmodels.) I've noted the 3 different patterns that have a consistent associativity.

From this I'm leaning towards the conclusions that:

- Expressions with complex parenthesization do happen, but probably not often enough to justify elaborate stuff like my 'chaining' proposal -- only 8.7% of these cases involve more than one @.

- There's very little support here for the intuition that right-associativity is more useful than left-associativity on a day-to-day basis.

--
Nathaniel J. Smith
Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh
http://vorpus.org