On Mon, Nov 6, 2017 at 4:28 PM, Stephan Hoyer shoyer@gmail.com wrote:
What's needed, though, is not just a single ABC. Some thought and design needs to go into segmenting the ndarray API to declare certain behaviors, just like was done for collections:
https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.abc.html
You don't just have a single ABC declaring a collection, but rather "I am a mapping" or "I am a mutable sequence". It's more of a pain for developers to properly specify things, but this is not a bad thing to actually give code some thought.
I agree, it would be nice to nail down a hierarchy of duck-arrays, if possible. Although, there are quite a few options, so I don't know how doable this is.
Exactly -- there are an exponential amount of options...
Well, to get the ball rolling a bit, the key thing that matplotlib needs to know is if `shape`, `reshape`, 'size', broadcasting, and logical indexing is respected. So, I see three possible abc's here: one for attribute access (things like `shape` and `size`) and another for shape manipulations (broadcasting and reshape, and assignment to .shape).
I think we're going to get into an string of ABCs:
ArrayLikeForMPL_ABC
etc, etc.....
And then a third abc for indexing support, although, I am not sure how that could get implemented...
This is the really tricky one -- all ABCs really check is the existence of methods -- making sure they behave the same way is up to the developer of the ducktype.
which is K, but will require discipline.
But indexing, specifically fancy indexing, is another matter -- I'm not sure if there even a way with an ABC to check for what types of indexing are support, but we'd still have the problem with whether the semantics are the same!
For example, I work with netcdf variable objects, which are partly duck-typed as ndarrays, but I think n-dimensional fancy indexing works differently... how in the world do you detect that with an ABC???
For the shapes and reshaping, I wrote an ShapedLikeNDArray mixin/ABC
for astropy, which may be a useful starting point as it also provides a way to implement the methods ndarray uses to reshape and get elements: see https://github.com/astropy/astropy/blob/master/astropy/utils/misc.py#L863
Sounds like a good starting point for discussion.
-CHB