[Numpy-discussion] NEP 31 — Context-local and global overrides of the NumPy API

[Hameer Abbasi]

On 08.09.19 10:56, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 1:04 AM Hameer Abbasi <einstein.edison at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 08.09.19 09:53, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>>> OTOH, __array_function__ doesn't allow this kind of simplification: if
>>> we were using __array_function__ for ufuncs, every library would have
>>> to special-case every individual ufunc, which leads to dramatically
>>> more work and more potential for bugs.
>> But uarray does allow this kind of simplification. You would do the following inside a uarray backend:
>>
>> def __ua_function__(func, args, kwargs):
>>      with ua.skip_backend(self_backend):
>>          # Do code here, dispatches to everything but
> You can dispatch to the underlying operation, sure, but you can't
> implement a generic ufunc loop because you don't know that 'func' is
> actually a bound ufunc method, or have any way to access the
> underlying ufunc object. (E.g. consider the case where 'func' is
> 'np.add.reduce'.) The critical part of my example was that it's a new
> ufunc that none of these libraries have ever heard of before.
>
> Ufuncs have lot of consistent structure beyond what generic Python
> callables have, and the whole point of __array_ufunc__ is that
> implementors can rely on that structure. You get to work at a higher
> level of abstraction.
>
> A similar but simpler example would be the protocol we've sketched out
> for concatenation: the idea would be to capture the core similarity
> between np.concatenate/np.hstack/np.vstack/np.dstack/np.column_stack/np.row_stack/any
> other variants, so that implementors only have to worry about the
> higher-level concept of "concatenation" rather than the raw APIs of
> all those individual functions.

There's a solution for that too: Default implementations. Implement 
concatenate, and you've got a default implementation for all of those 
you mentioned.

Similarly for transpose/swapaxis/moveaxis and family.

>
> -n
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> -n
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