On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 2:43 PM, Pierre Haessig <pierre.haes...@crans.org> wrote: > If the idea of having two payloads is to avoid a maximum of "skipna & > friends" extra keywords, I would like it much. My feeling with my small > experience with R is that I end up calling every function with a > different magical set of keywords (na.rm, na.action, ... and I forgot).
While I can't in general defend R on consistency grounds, there is a logic to this particular case. Most basic R functions like 'sum' take the na.rm= argument, which can be True or False and is equivalent to the skipna argument we've talked about for ufuncs. The functions that take other arguments (like na.action= for model fitting functions, or use= for their equivalent of np.corrcoef) are the ones that have *more* than 2 ways to handle NAs. E.g. model fitting functions given NAs can raise an error, skip the NA cases, or pass the NA cases through, and the correlation matrix function has different options for what to do with cases where one column has an NA but there are two others that don't. Having a distinction between missing and ignored values doesn't really affect whether you need such options. (If anything I guess it could make such options even more complicated -- what if I want my regression function to error out on missing but skip over ignored values, etc.) - N _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
