[Numpy-discussion] RFC: out of range slice indexes

[Neal Becker]

I've never liked that python silently ignores slices with out of range
indexes.  I believe this is a source of bugs (it has been for me).  It goes
completely counter to the python philosophy.

I vote to ban them from numpy.
>>> from numpy import array
>>> x = array (xrange (10))
>>> x[11]
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
IndexError: index out of bounds
>>> x[:12] = 2
>>> x
array([2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2])
>>> len (x)
10

Silently ignoring the error x[:12] is a bad idea, IMO.  If it meant to
_extend_ x to have lenght 12, at least _that_ would be reasonable (but I'm
not advocating that position).

I believe that out of bounds indexes should always throw IndexError.  We
can't change that in Python now, but maybe we can in numpy.