[Numpy-discussion] ENH: Proposal to add atleast_nd function

[Joseph Fox-Rabinovitz]

I'm getting a generally lukewarm not negative response. Should we put it to
a vote?

- Joe

On Fri, Feb 12, 2021, 16:06 Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 3:42 PM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 9:21 PM Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 1:47 PM Ralf Gommers <ralf.gommers at gmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Fri, Feb 12, 2021 at 7:25 PM Sebastian Berg <
>>>> sebastian at sipsolutions.net> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Right, my initial feeling it that without such context `atleast_3d` is
>>>>> pretty surprising.  So I wonder if we can design `atleast_nd` in a way
>>>>> that it is explicit about this context.
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Agreed. I think such a use case is probably too specific to design a
>>>> single function for, at least in such a hardcoded way.
>>>>
>>>
>>> That might be an argument for not designing a new one (or at least not
>>> giving it such a name). Not sure it's a good argument for removing a
>>> long-standing one.
>>>
>>
>> I agree. I'm not sure deprecating is best. But introducing new
>> functionality where `nd(pos=3) != 3d` is also not great.
>>
>> At the very least, atleast_3d should be better documented. It also is
>> telling that Juan (a long-time) scikit-image dev doesn't like atleast_3d
>> and there's very little usage of it in scikit-image.
>>
>
> I'm fairly neutral on atleast_nd(). I think that for n=1 and n=2, you can
> derive The One Way to Do It from broadcasting semantics, but for n>=3, I'm
> not sure there's much value in trying to systematize it to a single
> convention. I think that once you get up to those dimensions, you start to
> want to have domain-specific semantics. I do agree that, in retrospect,
> atleast_3d() probably should have been named more specifically. It was of a
> piece of other conveniences like dstack() that did special things to
> support channel-last images (and implicitly treat 3D arrays as such). For
> example, DL frameworks that assemble channeled images into minibatches
> (with different conventions like BHWC and BCHW), you'd want the n=4
> behavior to do different things. I _think_ you'd just want to do those with
> different functions than a complicated set of arguments to one function.
>
> --
> Robert Kern
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