Hi, On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 1:10 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:
Hi all,
It looks like we've gotten a bit confused and need to untangle something. There's a PR to add new functions 'np.filled' and 'np.filled_like': https://github.com/numpy/numpy/pull/2875 And there was a discussion about this on the list back in January: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.numeric.general/52763
I think a reasonable summary of the opinions in the thread are: - This functionality is great, ... - ...but we can't call it 'np.filled' because there's also 'np.ma.filled' which does something else... - ...but there really aren't any better names... - ...so we should overload np.empty, like: 'np.empty(shape, fill=value)'
In the mean time the original submitter has continued puttering along polishing the original patch, and it's ready to merge... except it's still the original interface, somehow the thread discussion and the PR discussion never met up.
:) - a temptation that is can be hard to resist.
So, we have to decide what to do.
Personally I think that overloading np.empty is horribly ugly, will continue confusing newbies and everyone else indefinitely, and I'm 100% convinced that we'll regret implementing such a warty interface for something that should be so idiomatic. (Unfortunately I got busy and didn't actually say this in the previous thread though.)
Maybe you could unpack this, as I seem to remember this was the option with the most support previously. Cheers, Matthew