# [Numpy-discussion] new numpy docs, missing function and parse error - dirichlet distribution

joep josef.pktd@gmail....
Thu May 22 10:11:10 CDT 2008

Hi,
I was just looking around at the new numpy documentation and got a
xhtml parsing error on the page (with Firefox):

http://mentat.za.net/numpy/refguide/random.xhtml#index-29351

The offending line contains
$X pprox prod_{i=1}^{k}{x^{lpha_i-1}_i}$<
in the docstring of the dirichlet distribution

the corresponding line in the source at
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/browser/trunk/numpy/random/mtrand/mtrand.pyx
is
.. math:: X \\approx \\prod_{i=1}^{k}{x^{\\alpha_i-1}_i}

(I have no idea, why it seems not to parse \\a correctly).

When looking for this, I found that the Dirichlet distribution is
missing from the new Docstring Wiki, http://sd-2116.dedibox.fr/doc/Docstrings/numpy/random

Then I saw that Dirichlet is also missing in  __all__ in
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/browser/trunk/numpy/random/info.py

As a consequence numpy.lookfor does not find Dirichlet
>>> numpy.lookfor('dirichlet')
Search results for 'dirichlet'
------------------------------
>>> import numpy.random
>>> dir(numpy.random)
contains dirichlet
>>> numpy.random.__all__
does not contain dirichlet.

To me this seems to be a documentation bug.

Josef