[Numpy-discussion] Should arr.diagonal() return a copy or a view? (1.7 compatibility issue)

Nathaniel Smith njs at pobox.com
Wed May 23 18:31:48 EDT 2012


On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 10:53 PM, Travis Oliphant <travis at continuum.io> wrote:
> To be clear, I'm not opposed to the change, and it looks like we should go forward.
>
> In my mind it's not about developers vs. users as satisfying users is the whole point.   The purpose of NumPy is not to make its developers happy :-).   But, users also want there to *be* developers on NumPy so developer happiness is not irrelevant.
>
> In this case, though, there are consequences for users because of the double copy if a user wants to make their code future proof.   We are always trading off predicted user-experiences.    I hope that we all don't have the same perspective on every issue or more than likely their aren't enough voices being heard from real users.

I'm not really worried about users who have a problem with the
double-copy. It's a totally legitimate concern, but anyone who has
that concern has already understood the issues well enough to be able
to take care of themselves, and decided that it's worth the effort to
special-case this. They can check whether the returned array has .base
set to tell whether it's an array or a view, use a temporary hack to
check for the secret warning flag in arr.flags.num, check the numpy
version, all sorts of things to get them through the one version where
this matters. The suggestion in the docs to make a copy is not exactly
binding :-).

-- Nathaniel



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