[Python-ideas] Extremely weird itertools.permutations

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 08:37:59AM -0400, Neil Girdhar wrote:
> Actually I didn't notice that.  It seems weird to find erf in math, but erf
> for complex numbers in scipy.special.  It's just about organization and
> user discovery.  I realize that from the developer's point of view, erf for
> complex numbers is complicated, but why does the user care?

99% of users don't care about math.errf at all. Of those who do, 99%
don't care about cmath.errf. I'd like to see cmath.errf because I'm a
maths junkie, but if I were responsible for *actually doing the work*
I'd make the same decision to leave cmath.errf out and leave it for a
larger, more complete library like scipy.

There are an infinitely large number of potential programs which could 
in principle be added to Python's std lib, and only a finite number of 
person-hours to do the work. And there are costs to adding software to 
the std lib, not just benefits.


-- 
Steven