[Numpy-discussion] towards a more productive missing values/masked arrays discussion...

[Mark Wiebe]

On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 2:20 PM, Nathaniel Smith <njs at pobox.com> wrote:

> So one thing that came up on the call yesterday is that there actually
> is a significant chunk of functionality that everyone seems to agree
> is useful, needed, and basically how it should work.
>
> This includes:
>  -- the basic existence and semantics for NA values (however this is
> implemented)
>  -- that there should exist a dtype/bit-pattern implementation for
> NAs (whatever other implementations there might also be)
>  -- that ufunc's should take a where= argument
>  -- that there should be a better way for ndarray subclasses like
> numpy.ma to override the arguments to ufuncs involving them
>  -- maybe some other things I'm not thinking of
>
> The real controversy is around what role masking should play, both at
> the API and implementation level; there are lots of different
> arguments for different approaches, and it's not at all clear any
> current proposal will actually solve the problems are facing (or even
> what those problems are).
>
> So rather than continue to go around in circles indefinitely on that,
> I'm going to write up some "miniNEPs" just focusing on the details of
> how the features we do agree on should work, so we can hopefully have
> a more technical discussion of *that*.
>

That sounds alright to me. One thing I would like to ask is to please adopt
the vocabulary we are discussing, using it exactly as defined so that people
reading all the various ideas don't have to readjust when switching between
documents.

Thanks,
Mark


>
> Cheers,
> -- Nathaniel
> _______________________________________________
> NumPy-Discussion mailing list
> NumPy-Discussion at scipy.org
> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/attachments/20110706/ded09838/attachment.html>