On 1 February 2014 20:10, Wolfgang Maier <wolfgang.maier@biologie.uni-freiburg.de> wrote:
Greg Ewing <greg.ewing@...> writes:
Wolfgang Maier wrote:
Mappings may be an excellent way of specifying frequencies and weights in an elegant way.
That may be, but I think I'd rather have a separate function, or a mode argument, explicitly indicating that this is what you want. Detecting whether something is a mapping in a duck-typed way is dodgy in general.
There should be nothing dodgy about this with the abstract base class Mapping.
I agree with Greg about this. I dislike APIs that try to be too clever about accepting different types of input. The mode() function is clearly intended to accept an iterable not a Counter and I consider it a bug that it does. It can be fixed to treat a Counter as an iterable by changing the _counts function to do collections.Counter(data) to collections.Counter(iter(data)) If you want the option for doing statistics with Counter style data formats then they should be invoked explicitly as Greg says. Oscar