On Sat, Jul 18, 2020, 00:21 Ricky Teachey <ricky@teachey.org> wrote:

This raises a question that needs to be answered, then: what would be the utility of mixing together positional and kwd arguments in this way?

Even the xarray examples given so far don't seem to make use of this mixture. From my knowledge of pandas I am not sure what the meaning of this would be, either.

For xarray an index can have a position, a label, or both. So being able to mix positional and label-based indexing is important. I just didn't include that in the examples because I was focusing on the advantage of label-based indexing.