On Wed, Dec 18, 2013 at 3:23 PM, Alan G Isaac <alan.isaac@gmail.com> wrote:

For teaching it is certainly nice to have numpy.polynomial.polynomial.polyfit
providing modern (vs. traditional) parameter order, but

- it is rather buried
- np.polyfit uses traditional order and has the same name

I recall there was some controversy (?) over all of this,
but might it not be appropriate to have a keyword argument to
both specifying whether the parameter order is to be modern
or traditional (in both polyfits and polyvals)?

It would be messy, as there are a lot of functions in polynomial.polynomial that depend on the coefficient order. For the higher level Polynomial class, there is a routine in ipython that will do a pretty display of Polynomial instances which might be useful. Let's see... look here http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/ipython/ipython/blob/master/examples/notebooks/Custom%20Display%20Logic.ipynb and search the page for Polynomial.

Chuck