On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 7:25 AM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 1:56 PM, Charles R Harris
<charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Oct 1, 2013 at 4:43 AM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Sep 30, 2013 at 10:51 PM, Christoph Gohlke <cgohlke@uci.edu>
>> wrote:
>> > 2) Bottleneck 0.7.0
>> >
>> > https://github.com/kwgoodman/bottleneck/issues/71#issuecomment-25331701
>>
>> I can't tell if these are real bugs in numpy, or tests checking that
>> bottleneck is bug-for-bug compatible with old numpy and we just fixed
>> some bugs, or what. It's clearly something to do with the
>> nanarg{max,min} rewrite -- @charris, do you know what's going on here?
>>
>
> Yes ;) The previous behaviour of nanarg for all-nan axis was to cast nan to
> intp when the result was an array, and return nan when a scalar. The current
> behaviour is to return the most negative value of intp as an error marker in
> both cases and raise a warning. It is a change in behavior, but I think one
> that needs to be made.

Ah, okay! I kind of lost track of the nanfunc changes by the end there.

So for the bottleneck issue, it sounds like the problem is just that
bottleneck is still emulating the old numpy behaviour in this corner
case, which isn't really a problem. So we don't really need to worry
about that, both behaviours are correct, just maybe out of sync.

I'm a little dubious about this "make up some weird value that will
*probably* blow up if people try to use it without checking, and also
raise a warning" thing, wouldn't it make more sense to just raise an
error? That's what exceptions are for? I guess I should have said
something earlier though...


I figure the blowup is safe, as we can't allocate arrays big enough that the minimum intp value would be a valid index. I considered raising an error, and if there is a consensus the behavior could be changed. Or we could add a keyword to determine the behavior.

Chuck