On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 5:38 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Hi, > > On Wed, Jul 6, 2011 at 4:40 PM, Mark Wiebe <mwwi...@gmail.com> wrote: >> It appears to me that one of the biggest reason some of us have been talking >> past each other in the discussions is that different people have different >> definitions for the terms being used. Until this is thoroughly cleared up, I >> feel the design process is tilting at windmills. >> In the interests of clarity in our discussions, here is a starting point >> which is consistent with the NEP. These definitions have been added in a >> glossary within the NEP. If there are any ideas for amendments to these >> definitions that we can agree on, I will update the NEP with those >> amendments. Also, if I missed any important terms which need to be added, >> please propose definitions for them. >> NA (Not Available) >> A placeholder for a value which is unknown to computations. That >> value may be temporarily hidden with a mask, may have been lost >> due to hard drive corruption, or gone for any number of reasons. >> This is the same as NA in the R project. > > Really? Can one implement NA with a mask in R? I thought an NA was > always bitpattern in R?
I don't think that was what Mark was saying, see this bit later in this email: >> The most important distinctions I'm trying to draw are: >> 1) NA vs IGNORE and bitpattern vs mask are completely independent. Any >> combination of NA as bitpattern, NA as mask, IGNORE as bitpattern, and >> IGNORE as mask are reasonable. This point as I understood it is there is the semantics of the special values (not available vs ignore), and there is the implementation (bitpattern vs mask), and they are independent. Peter _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
