[Numpy-discussion] Re: ndarray.fill and ma.array.filled

[Tim Hochberg]

Sasha wrote:

>On 4/7/06, Tim Hochberg <tim.hochberg at cox.net> wrote:
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>>[...]
>>Perhaps MaskedArray should inherit from ndarray for the time being. Many
>>of the methods would need to reimplemented anyway, but it would make
>>asanyarray work. Someone was just complaining about asarray munging his
>>arrays. That's correct behaviour, but it would be nice if asanyarray did
>>the right thing. I suppose we could just special case asanyarray to
>>ignore MaskedArrays, that might be better since it's less constraining
>>from an implementation side too.
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>Just for the record.  Currently MA does not inherit from ndarray. 
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Right, I checked that. That's why asanyarray won't work now with MA 
(unless someone changed the implementation of that while I wan't looking.

>There are some benefits to be gained from changing MA design from
>containment to inheritance, by I am very sceptical about the use of
>inheritance in the array setting.
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That's probably a sensible position.

Still it would be nice to have asanyarray pass masked arrays through 
somehow.  I haven't thought this through very well, but I wonder if it 
would make sense for asanyarray to pass any object that supplies 
__array__. I'm leary of special casing asanyarray just for MA; somehow 
that seems the wrong approach.

>>This may be an oportune time to propose something that's been cooking in
>>the back of my head for a week or so now: A stripped down array
>>superclass.
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>This is a very worthwhile idea and I hate to see it burried in a
>non-descriptive thread.  I've copied your proposal to the wiki at
><http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/wiki/ArraySuperClass>.
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Thanks for doing that. I'm glad you like the general idea. I do plan to 
write it through and try to get a better handle on what this would 
entail and what the consequences would be. However, I'm not sure exactly 
when I'll get around to it so it's probably better that a rough draft be 
out there for people to think about in the interim.

-tim


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