[Numpy-discussion] Release of 1.0b5 this weekend

[David M. Cooke]

On Tue, 29 Aug 2006 14:03:39 -0700
Tim Hochberg <tim.hochberg at ieee.org> wrote:

> Of these,  clip, conjugate and round support an 'out' argument like that 
> supported by ufunces;  byteswap has a boolean argument telling it 
> whether to perform operations in place; and sort always operates in 
> place. Noting that the ufunc-like methods (max, argmax, etc) appear to 
> support the 'out' argument as well although it's not documented for most 
> of them, it looks to me as if the two odd methods are byteswap and sort. 
> The method situation could be made more consistent by swapping the 
> boolean inplace flag in byteswapped with another 'out' argument and also 
> having sort not operate in place by default, but also supply an out 
> argument there. Thus:
> 
> b = a.sort()   # Returns a copy
> a.sort(out=a) # Sorts a in place
> a.sort(out=c) # Sorts a into c (probably just equivalent to c = a.sort() 
> in this case since we don't want to rewrite the sort routines)

Ugh. That's completely different semantics from sort() on lists, so I think
it would be a source of bugs (at least, it would mean keeping two different
ideas of .sort() in my head).

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|David M. Cooke                      http://arbutus.physics.mcmaster.ca/dmc/
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