On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 11:13 PM, Thouis (Ray) Jones <thouis@gmail.com>wrote:
On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 10:27 AM, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Jan 16, 2013 at 5:11 PM, eat <e.antero.tammi@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi,
In a recent thread http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/52772 it was proposed that .fill(.) should return self as an alternative for a
trivial
two-liner.
I'm raising now the question: what if all in-place operations indeed could return self? How bad this would be? A 'strong' counter argument may be found at http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2003-October/038855.html .
But anyway, at least for me. it would be much more straightforward to implement simple mini dsl's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain-specific_language) a much more straightforward manner.
What do you think?
I've read Guido about why he didn't like inplace operations returning self and found him convincing for a while. And then I listened to other folks express a preference for the freight train style and found them convincing also. I think it comes down to a preference for one style over another and I go back and forth myself. If I had to vote, I'd go for returning self, but I'm not sure it's worth breaking python conventions to do so.
Chuck
I'm -1 on breaking with Python convention without very good reasons.
Three times -1: on breaking Python conventions, on changing any existing numpy functions/methods for something like this, and on having similarly named functions like shuffle/shuffled that basically do the same thing. +1 on using out= more, and on some general guideline on function-naming-grammar. Ralf