[Numpy-discussion] alterNEP - was: missing data discussion round 2

[Nathaniel Smith]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 11:27 AM, Lluís <xscript at gmx.net> wrote:
> As I tried to convey on my other mail, separating both will force you to
> either:
>
> * Make a copy of the array before passing it to another routine (because
>  the routine will assign np.NA but you still want the original data)

To help me understand, do you have an example in mind of a routine
that would do that? I can't think of any cases where I had some
original data that some routine wanted to throw out and replace with
NAs; it just seems... weird. Maybe I'm missing something though...

(I can imagine that it would make sense for what we're calling a
masked array, where you have some routine which computes which values
should be ignored for a particular purpose. But if it only makes sense
for masked arrays then you can just write your routine to work with
masked arrays only, and it doesn't matter how similar the masking and
missing APIs are.)

-- Nathaniel