On 4/7/06, Tim Hochberg
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1. I don't like default fill value. It should be mandatory to supply fill value.
That makes perfect sense. If anything should have a default fill value, it's the functsion calling filled, not the arrays themselves.
It looks like we are getting close to a consensus on this one. I will remove fill_value attribute. [...]
3. The name conflicts with the "fill" method.
I thought you wanted to kill that. I'd certainly support that. Can't we just special case __setitem__ for that one case so that the performance is just as good if performance is really the issue?
I'll propose a patch.
4. View/Copy inconsistency. Does not provide a method to fill values in-place.
b[b.mask] = fill_value; b.unmask()
seems to work for this purpose. Can we just have filled return a copy?
+1
mask:
1. I've got rid of mask returning None in favor of False_ (boolean array scalar), but it is still not perfect. I would prefer data.shape == mask.shape invariant and if space saving/performance is deemed necessary use zero-stride arrays.
Interesting idea. Is that feasible yet?
It is not feasible in pure python module like ma, but easy in ndarray. We can also reset the writeable flag to avoid various problems that zero strides may cause. I'll propose a patch.
2. I don't like the name. "Missing" or "na" would be better.
I'm not on board here, although really I'd like to here from other people who use the package. 'na' seems to cryptic to me and 'missing' to specific -- there might be other reasons to mask a value other it being missing. The problem with mask is that it's not clear whether True means the data is useful or unuseful. Keep throwing out names, maybe one will stick.
The problem with the "mask" name is that ndarray already has unrelated "putmask" method. On the other hand putmask is redundant with fancy indexing. I have no other problem with "mask" name, so we may just decide to get rid of "putmask".
[...] How do you set the mask? I keep getting attribute errors when I try it.
a[i] = masked makes i-th element masked. If mask is an array, you can just set its elements.
And unmask would be a noop on an ndarray.
Yes. [...]