[Python-ideas] Boolean ABC similar to what's provided in the 'numbers' module

[David Mertz]

I'm not sure I'm convinced by Sylvain that Boolean needs to be an ABC in
the standard library; Guido expresses skepticism.  Of course it is possible
to define it in some other library that actually needs to use
`isinstance(x, Boolean)` as Sylvain demonstraits in his post.  I'm not sure
I'm unconvinced either, I can see a certain value to saying a given value
is "fully round-trippable to bool" (as is np.bool_).

But just for anyone who doesn't know NumPy, here's a quick illustration of
what I alluded to:

In [1]: import numpy as np
In [2]: arr = np.array([7,8,12,33])
In [3]: ndx1 = np.array([0,1,1,0], dtype=int)
In [4]: ndx2 = np.array([0,1,1,0], dtype=bool)
In [5]: arr[ndx1]
Out[5]: array([7, 8, 8, 7])
In [6]: arr[ndx2]
Out[6]: array([ 8, 12])

ndx1 and ndx2 are both nice things (and are both often programmatically
constructed by operations in NumPy).  But indexing using ndx1 gives us an
array of the things in the listed *positions* in arr.  In this case, we
happen to choose two each of the things an index 0 and index 1 in the
result.

Indexing by ndx2 gives us a filter of only those positions in arr
corresponding to 'True's.  These are both nice things to be able to do, but
if NumPy's True was a special kind of 1, it wouldn't work out
unambiguously.  However, recent versions of NumPy *have* gotten a bit
smarter about recognizing the special type of Python bools, so it's less of
a trap than it used to be.  Still, contrast these (using actual Python
lists for the indexes:

In [10]: arr[[False, True, True, False]]
Out[10]: array([ 8, 12])
In [11]: arr[[False, True, 1, 0]]
Out[11]: array([7, 8, 8, 7])




On Mon, Feb 12, 2018 at 7:50 PM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 13 February 2018 at 02:14, David Mertz <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:
> > NumPy np.bool_ is specifically not a subclass of any np.int_.  If it
> we're,
> > there would be an ambiguity between indexing with a Boolean array and an
> > array of ints. Both are meaningful, but they mean different things (mask
> vs
> > collection of indices).
> >
> > Do we have other examples a Python ABC that exists to accommodate
> something
> > outside the standard library or builtins? Even if not, NumPy is
> special...
> > the actual syntax for '@' exists primarily for that library!
>
> collections.abc.Sequence and collections.abc.Mapping come to mind -
> the standard library doesn't tend to distinguish between different
> kinds of subscriptable objects, but it's a distinction some third
> party libraries and tools want to be able to make reliably.
>
> The other comparison that comes to mind would be the distinction
> between "__int__" ("can be coerced to an integer, but may lose
> information in the process") and "__index__" ("can be losslessly
> converted to and from a builtin integer").
>
> Right now, we only define boolean coercion via "__bool__" - there's no
> mechanism to say "this *is* a boolean value that can be losslessly
> converted to and from the builtin boolean constants". That isn't a
> distinction the standard library makes, but it sounds like it's one
> that NumPy cares about (and NumPy was also the main driver for
> introducing __index__).
>
> Cheers,
> Nick.
>
> --
> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
>



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