[Numpy-discussion] Uncomfortable with matrix change

[Jarrod Millman]

On Sat, May 10, 2008 at 8:14 AM, Keith Goodman <kwgoodman at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If these are backed out, will some kind of deprecation
>> warning be added for scalar indexing, as Travis suggested?
>> Robert's request seems in accord with this.
>
> Shouldn't a deprecation warning explain what the future behavior will
> be? Is there a firm consensus on what that behavior will be?

I agree that a deprecation warning needs to explain the future
behavior and don't believe we have agreed on what it should be yet.

I don't personally have an opinion on the what the new behavior should
be at this point.  But I don't think it makes sense to add deprecation
warnings at this point--unless we know exactly what it is that we will
be doing in the future.  So while it could be argued that it would be
useful to say "use x[0,:] instead of x[0] to return row 0 as a matrix"
in the 1.1 release, my sense is that we will still need to replace
that DeprecationWarning in 1.2 with a new DeprecationWarning saying
something like "in 1.3 x[0] will return .... and if you want .... you
will need to call x[0,:]".  I don't think we should have two different
DeprecationWarnings in back to back releases and believe that we
should wait to include the warning until we decide what the new
behavior will be in 1.2.

-- 
Jarrod Millman
Computational Infrastructure for Research Labs
10 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley
phone: 510.643.4014
http://cirl.berkeley.edu/