[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] Naming Conventions And Practical Experience

[James Hugunin]

Personally, I'm not terribly unhappy with the current naming
conventions and feature set.  I agree that they could be better, but I
lack the time to sit down and do a careful redesign.  The current
feature set is significantly more powerful than the basic array
operations provided by matlab, the most popular array processing
language that people buy.

Rather than complaining about the lack of a list of the available
functions, David Ascher recently sat down and pulled them out of the C
and python source code (not too hard to do, since I did include doc
strings for everything).  Check out his beta tutorial
(http://maigret.cog.brown.edu/python/arraytut.html) for the current
set of names in use.  It's still an early draft with the expected
bugs, but its getting close to a fairly complete intro.


I'm going to step out of my current role of moderator for this issue.
If somebody else out there has the time and energy to design a
complete set of functions and methods for the system, go for it.  If
you write this up nicely and can convince the people in this SIG that
your feature set makes sense, I'll be happy to implement it (well, so
long as you don't ask me to solve the halting problem).  Otherwise,
I'm tired of people asking for me to do things like make a better
distinction between functions and methods.  This is just not useful
unless I had more free time than I do.

Sorry for the negative tone, but I've been getting a few too many
questions like "So how's your speech recognition system coming along?"
from my advisor lately and I'm eager to get the array object "out the
door".  Bug fixes take up very little of my intellectual energy, but
these issues of naming conventions and function sets use up way too
much.

-Jim


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