[Numpy-discussion] Silent Broadcasting considered harmful

josef.pktd at gmail.com josef.pktd at gmail.com
Sun Feb 8 16:15:56 EST 2015


On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 4:08 PM, Eelco Hoogendoorn
<hoogendoorn.eelco at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I personally use Octave and/or Numpy  for several years now and never ever
>> needed braodcasting.
> But since it is still there there will be many users who need it, there will
> be some use for it.
>
> Uhm, yeah, there is some use for it. Im all for explicit over implicit, but
> personally current broadcasting rules have never bothered me, certainly not
> to the extent of justifying massive backwards compatibility violations. Take
> It from someone who relies on broadcasting for every other line of code.
>
>
> On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 10:03 PM, Stefan Reiterer <domors at gmx.net> wrote:
>>
>> Hi!
>>
>> As shortly discussed on github:
>> https://github.com/numpy/numpy/issues/5541
>>
>> I personally think that silent Broadcasting is not a good thing. I had
>> recently a lot
>> of trouble with row and column vectors which got bradcastet toghether
>> altough it was
>> more annoying than useful, especially since I had to search deep down into
>> the code to find out
>> that the problem was nothing else than Broadcasting...
>>
>> I personally use Octave and/or Numpy  for several years now and never ever
>> needed braodcasting.
>> But since it is still there there will be many users who need it, there
>> will be some use for it.
>>
>> So I suggest that the best would be to throw warnings when arrays get
>> Broadcasted like
>> Octave do. Python warnings can be catched and handled, that would be a
>> great benefit.
>>
>> Another idea would to provide warning levels for braodcasting, e.g
>> 0 = Never, 1=Warn once, 2=Warn always, 3 = Forbid aka throw exception,
>> with 0 as default.
>> This would avoid breaking other code, and give the user some control over
>> braodcasting.
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> Stefan


Numpy broadcasting is the greatest feature of numpy !!!

It just takes a bit of getting used to coming from another matrix language.


Josef
what 3!?


>>
>>
>>
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