[Numpy-discussion] where construct

[Christopher Barker]

Hans Meine wrote:
>> where( (a<1 or b<3), b,c)
> 
> Now + and | have been proposed to you, but it looks to me as if the "correct 
> way" would be logical_or.  All solutions give the same result, but logical_or 
> better expresses what you're trying to do:
> 
> In [9]: print where( (logical_or(a<1, b<3)), b,c)
> [4 2 2 1]
> (Think of the Zen.)

I'm not sure the Zen answers this one for us. It's really a matter of 
taste, and many of us prefer infix notation for this kind of thing. I think:

where( ( (a<1) | (b<3) ), b,c)

reads better than:

where( (logical_or(a<1, b<3)), b,c)

The only reason we need to use "|" (which means logical_or for boolean 
arrays) rather than "or" is that we can't overload the python "or" or 
"and" because they are designed to short-circuit. If you want to be 
really explicit, you could do:

where( (logical_or(less(a,1), less(b,3))), b,c)

or, since I like to use namespaces (also see the Zen):

import numpy as N
N.where( (N.logical_or(N.less(a,1), N.less(b,3))), b,c)

which are even harder to read.

-Chris


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Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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