On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 9:44 AM, Benjamin Root <ben.root@ou.edu> wrote:
I gave two counterexamples of why.
The examples you gave aren't counterexamples. See below...
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 7:06 PM, Darren Dale <dsdale24@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 4:19 PM, <josef.pktd@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, May 19, 2010 at 4:08 PM, Darren Dale <dsdale24@gmail.com> wrote:
I have a question about creation of numpy arrays from a list of objects, which bears on the Quantities project and also on masked arrays:
> import quantities as pq > import numpy as np > a, b = 2*pq.m,1*pq.s > np.array([a, b]) array([ 12., 1.])
Why doesn't that create an object array? Similarly:
Consider the use case of a person creating a 1-D numpy array: > np.array([12.0, 1.0]) array([ 12., 1.])
How is python supposed to tell the difference between > np.array([a, b]) and > np.array([12.0, 1.0]) ?
It can't, and there are plenty of times when one wants to explicitly initialize a small numpy array with a few discrete variables.
What do you mean it can't? 12.0 and 1.0 are floats, a and b are not. While, yes, they can be coerced to floats, this is a *lossy* transformation--it strips away information contained in the class, and IMHO should not be the default behavior. If I want the objects, I can force it: In [7]: np.array([a,b],dtype=np.object) Out[7]: array([2.0 m, 1.0 s], dtype=object) This works fine, but feels ugly since I have to explicitly tell numpy not to do something. It feels to me like it's violating the principle of "in the face of ambiguity, resist the temptation to guess." Ryan -- Ryan May Graduate Research Assistant School of Meteorology University of Oklahoma