[Numpy-discussion] array, asarray as contiguous and friends

[Tim Hochberg]

I was just looking at the interface for array and asarray to see what 
other stuff should go in the interface of the hypothetical 
ascontiguous.  There's 'dtype', which I knew about, and 'fortran', which 
I didn't, but which makes sense. However, there's also 'ndmin'. First 
off, it's not described in docstring for asarray, but I was able to find 
it in the docstring for array without a problem. Second, is it really 
necessary? It seems to be useful in an awfully narrow set of 
circumstances, particularly since when you are padding axes not everyone 
wants to pad to the left.

It would seem to be more useful to ditch the ndmin and have some sort of 
paddims function that was more full featured (padding to either the left 
or the right at a minimum). I'm not entirely sure what the best 
interface to such a beast would look like, but a simple tactic would be 
to just provide leftpaddims and rightpaddims.

If it's not allready clear by now (;), I prefer several narrow 
interfaces to one broad one.

-tim