On Wed, May 9, 2012 at 11:46 AM, Travis Oliphant <tra...@continuum.io>wrote:
> Hey all, > > Nathaniel and Mark have worked very hard on a joint document to try and > explain the current status of the missing-data debate. I think they've > done an amazing job at providing some context, articulating their views and > suggesting ways forward in a mutually respectful manner. This is an > exemplary collaboration and is at the core of why open source is valuable. > > The document is available here: > https://github.com/numpy/numpy.scipy.org/blob/master/NA-overview.rst > > After reading that document, it appears to me that there are some > fundamentally different views on how things should move forward. I'm also > reading the document incorporating my understanding of the history, of > NumPy as well as all of the users I've met and interacted with which means > I have my own perspective that is not necessarily incorporated into that > document but informs my recommendations. I'm not sure we can reach full > consensus on this. We are also well past time for moving forward with a > resolution on this (perhaps we can all agree on that). > > I would like one more discussion thread where the technical discussion can > take place. I will make a plea that we keep this discussion as free from > logical fallacies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_fallacy as we can. > I can't guarantee that I personally will succeed at that, but I can tell > you that I will try. That's all I'm asking of anyone else. I recognize > that there are a lot of other issues at play here besides *just* the > technical questions, but we are not going to resolve every community issue > in this technical thread. > > We need concrete proposals and so I will start with three. Please feel > free to comment on these proposals or add your own during the discussion. > I will stop paying attention to this thread next Wednesday (May 16th) (or > earlier if the thread dies) and hope that by that time we can agree on a > way forward. If we don't have agreement, then I will move forward with > what I think is the right approach. I will either write the code myself > or convince someone else to write it. > > In all cases, we have agreement that bit-pattern dtypes should be added to > NumPy. We should work on these (int32, float64, complex64, str, bool) > to start. So, the three proposals are independent of this way forward. > The proposals are all about the extra mask part: > > My three proposals: > > * do nothing and leave things as is > > * add a global flag that turns off masked array support by default but > otherwise leaves things unchanged (I'm still unclear how this would work > exactly) > > * move Mark's "masked ndarray objects" into a new fundamental type > (ndmasked), leaving the actual ndarray type unchanged. The array_interface > keeps the masked array notions and the ufuncs keep the ability to handle > arrays like ndmasked. Ideally, numpy.ma would be changed to use > ndmasked objects as their core. > > For the record, I'm currently in favor of the third proposal. Feel free > to comment on these proposals (or provide your own). > I'm most in favour of the second proposal. It won't take very much effort, and more clearly marks off this code as experimental than just documentation notes. Thanks, -Mark > > Best regards, > > -Travis > > > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org > http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion > >
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