[Numpy-discussion] Response to PEP suggestions

[Timo Korvola]

"Colin J. Williams" <cjw at sympatico.ca> writes:
> Returning a zero rank array is an historical pain.

The historical pain is returning a scalar: that is what both Numeric
and Numarray currently do.  Returning a zero rank array would be a new
pain to replace that.

> It might make sense if all traditional Python objects were of zero
> rank  I can see no merit in that.

Pushing arrays that deep into the core language would be natural for a
language inteded for numerical linear algebra but perhaps not for a
general purpose language which people also use for web services and
whatnot.

> I was glad to see the proposal to abandon "ravel" ( a hangover from
> APL?).

I thought all APL builtins were denoted by weird special characters
rather than any readable or pronouncable names.  But I don't see ravel
actually being abandoned, as the PEP does not discuss functions much.
One reason for preferring functions to methods and attributes is that
functions can be made to work with scalars and generic sequences.

-- 
	Timo Korvola		<URL:http://www.iki.fi/tkorvola>