On 1/11/2012 4:28 PM, David Mertens wrote:
Chris -
The cynic in me would argue that this would be a non-issue with stricter
namespacing, but I suppose that in the end one would have imported this
method and run into the same problem even with stricter namespacing.
I think your idea makes sense, but I fear there is little we can do about
it now. User code might depend on the result being a piddle. Perhaps we
could implement this for PDL3, the non-backwards-compatible version of PDL
that rocks the numerical community's world slated to come out Christmas (of
some uspecified year). :-D
It seems more of a "feature" that floor() converts
a normal perl scalar into a piddle in addition to
its documented functionality.
It definitely conflicts (uneccessarily) with the
existing POSIX::floor functionality present in the
perl core module set. There are arguments for
either case although the "surprise" factor where
sequence() does not do what you mean because
of the PDL::floor data type conversion seems
persuasive to me.
Not something to rush in to, but I don't think
we should resort to preserving buggy implementations
when it decreases the usability and users ability
to understand what/how PDL works....
--Chris
On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Chris Marshall<[email protected]>wrote:
I was writing some code to generate sequence vectors
of the appropriate dimensionality and I ran the following
sequence:
pdl> $nmax = 1;
pdl> $nvec = sequence(floor($nmax+1));
pdl> p $nvec
0
which surprised me since I expected the result to
be [0,1] since floor($nmax+1) is 2. It turns out the
result is correct according to the documentation
_since_ the floor() routine generates a pdl output
value even if the input is a perl scalar. If you use
POSIX::floor instead, I get the expected result:
pdl> $nvec = sequence(POSIX::floor($nmax+1));
pdl> p $nvec
[0 1]
Maybe the PDL::floor routine (and similar routines)
should return perl scalars when passed perl scalars
as input args instead of piddles. Goes to show
you, PDL can always surprise you! :-)
--Chris
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