[Numpy-discussion] Time for beta1 of NumPy 1.0 (original) (raw)

Travis Oliphant oliphant at ee.byu.edu
Fri Jun 30 15:25:23 EDT 2006

Robert Kern wrote:

Travis Oliphant wrote:

Comments?

Whatever else you do, leave arange() alone. It should never have accepted floats in the first place.

Actually, Robert makes a good point. arange with floats is problematic. We should direct people to linspace instead of changing the default of arange. Most new users will probably expect arange to return a type similar to Python's range which is int.

Also: Keeping arange as ints reduces the number of errors from the change in the unit tests to

2 in NumPy 3 in SciPy

So, I think from both a pragmatic and idealized situtation, arange should stay with the default of ints. People who want arange to return floats should be directed to linspace.

-Travis

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