[Numpy-discussion] A crazy masked-array thought

[Richard Hattersley]

The masked array discussions have brought up all sorts of interesting
topics - too many to usefully list here - but there's one aspect I haven't
spotted yet. Perhaps that's because it's flat out wrong, or crazy, or just
too awkward to be helpful. But ...

Shouldn't masked arrays (MA) be a superclass of the plain-old-array (POA)?

In the library I'm working on, the introduction of MAs (via numpy.ma)
required us to sweep through the library and make a fair few changes.
That's not the sort of thing one would normally expect from the
introduction of a subclass.

Putting aside the ABI issue, would it help downstream API compatibility if
the POA was a subclass of the MA? Code that's expecting/casting-to a POA
might continue to work and, where appropriate, could be upgraded in their
own time to accept MAs.

Richard Hattersley
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