[Numpy-discussion] New Indexing Methods Revival #N (subclasses!)

[Marten van Kerkwijk]

Hi Sebastian,

It would seem to me that any subclass has to keep up to date with new
features in ndarray, and while I think ndarray has a responsibility
not to break backward compatibility, I do not think it has to protect
against new features possibly not working as expected in subclasses.
In particular, I think it is overly complicated (and an unnecessary
maintenance burden) to error out if a subclass has `__getitem__`
overwritten, but not `oindex`.

For somewhat similar reasons, I'm not too keen on a new
`__numpy_getitem__` method; I realise it might reduce complexity for
some ndarray subclasses eventually, but it also is an additional
maintenance burden. If you really think it is useful, I think it might
be more helpful to define a new mixin class which provides a version
of all indexing methods that just call `__numpy_getitem__` if that is
provided by the class that uses the mixin. I would *not* put it in
`ndarray` proper.

Indeed, the above might even be handier for subclasses, since they can
choose, if they wish, to implement a similar mixin for older numpy
versions, so that all the numpy version stuff can be moved to a single
location. (E.g., I can imagine doing the same for `__numpy_ufunc__`.)

Overall, my sense would be to keep your PR to just implementing the
various new index methods (which are great -- I still don't really
like the names, but sadly don't have better suggestions...).

But it might be good if others pipe in here too, in particular those
maintaining ndarray subclasses!

All the best,

Marten