[Numpy-discussion] Response to PEP suggestions

[Darren Dale]

On Thursday 17 February 2005 02:11 pm, Fernando Perez wrote:
>  The danger with:
>
> if mystr[0] in ('a','b','c'): ...
>
> is that if mystr is empty, this blows up.  Thanks to Python's acceptance of
> invalid indices in slices, I used
>
> if mystr[0:1] in ('a','b','c'): ...
>

Has Numeric or numarray considered allowing assignment to invalid indices? I 
sometimes miss being able to do this:
a=zeros(2)
a[1:0]=1

in order to get this:
[[0,0],
 [1,0]]

I guess it is not consistent with the list operations in python, but it is a 
really handy shortcut for constructing arrays interactively.


Darren