On Sun, Jul 19, 2020 at 6:35 PM Dominik Vilsmeier <dominik.vilsmeier@gmx.de> wrote:
But this looks unnecessarily complicated. Why can't xarray allow the following:
ds["empty"]["lon", 1:5, "lat", 3:] = 10
which looks very close to the proposed syntax below. Not that I'm against the proposal but I think that any use case involving *only* keyword arguments isn't a very strong one, because it can easily be solved that way without a change to existing syntax.
Xarray already allows positional slices in multiple dimensions. The existing dict weirdness is to have a way to introduce the named dimensions. But suppose that the array in question had a first listed 'altitude'. I think nowadays, we can write: arr.loc[50:60, 1:5, 3:] If we only reference dimensions by number not by name. Under the "commas separate keys from values" this would be difficult: arr.loc[50:60, "lon", 1:5, "lat", 3:] Yes, I can imagine a rule like "If it is a slice that wasn't preceded by a string, treat it as positional, otherwise if it is a string treat it as a key, but treat the next thing after a string as the slice value corresponding to that key." That seems more error prone and harder to grok than the potential: arr.loc[50:60, lon=1:5, lat=3:] Where you'd still just have to know that "axis 0 is altitude" of your particular array.