[Numpy-discussion] Emulate left outer join?

[John Hunter]

On Tue, Feb 9, 2010 at 7:02 PM, Pierre GM <pgmdevlist@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 9, 2010, at 7:54 PM, Pauli Virtanen wrote:
>>
>> But, should we make these functions available under some less
>> internal-ish namespace? There's numpy.rec at the least -- it could be
>> made a real module to pull in things from core and lib.
>
> I still think these functions are more generic than the rec_ prefix let think, and I'd still prefer a decision being made about what should go in the module before thinking too hard about how to advertise it.

I would love to see many of these as methods of record/structured
arrays, so we could say

  r = r1.join('date', r2)

or

  rs = r.groupby( ('year', 'month'), stats)

and have "totxt", "tocsv". etc... from rec2txt, rec2csv, etc...   I
think the functionality of mlab.rec_summarize and rec_groupby is very
useful, but the interface is a bit clunky and could be made easier for
the common use cases.

These methods could call the proper functions from np.lib.recfunctions
or wherever, and they would get a lot more visibility to people using
introspection.

JDH