On Sat, Nov 12, 2016 at 11:10 AM, David Mertz <mertz@gnosis.cx> wrote:
+100
I like this idea of giving `slice` a metaclass that defines a `.__getitem__()` allowing us to construct slices on the slice type itself.
FWIW, this is exactly what pandas.IndexSlice does. E.g., from http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/advanced.html:
Indeed, this would be really nice! The requirement to use a special object to construct slices outside of indexing is a repeated pain-point for me and users of pandas/xarray. To non-experts, it's not at all obvious what slice(None, 3, None) means, but slice[:3] has the familiar syntax. In xarray, we encourage passing around slice objects to do indexing with keyword arguments [1], e.g., data.sel(time=slice(100)) to pull out the first 100 values along the time axis. data.sel(time=slice[:100]) would be a significant improvement. Even if we ever get indexing with keyword arguments in Python, I still like the readability of data[time=slice[:100]] better than data[time=:100], where the colon gets lost. [1] http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/indexing.html#indexing-with-labeled-dimen...