[Python-Dev] PEP 450 adding statistics module (original) (raw)

R. David Murray rdmurray at bitdance.com
Thu Aug 15 20:24:50 CEST 2013

On Thu, 15 Aug 2013 14:10:39 -0400, "Eric V. Smith" <eric at trueblade.com> wrote:

On 08/15/2013 01:58 PM, Mark Dickinson wrote: > On Thu, Aug 15, 2013 at 2:08 PM, Steven D'Aprano <steve at pearwood.info_ _> <mailto:steve at pearwood.info>> wrote: > > > - Each scheme ended up needing to be a separate function, for ease > of both implementation and testing. So I had four private median > functions, which I put inside a class to act as namespace and avoid > polluting the main namespace. Then I needed a "master function" to > select which of the methods should be called, with all the > additional testing and documentation that entailed. > > > That's just an implementation issue, though, and sounds like a minor > inconvenience to the implementor rather than anything serious; I don't > think that that should dictate the API that's used. > > - The API doesn't really feel very Pythonic to me. For example, we > write: > > > And I guess this is subjective: conversely, the API you're proposing > doesn't feel Pythonic to me. :-) I'd like the hear the opinion of other > python-dev readers.

I agree with Mark: the proposed median, median.low, etc., doesn't feel right. Is there any example of doing this in the stdlib? I suggest just median(), medianlow(), etc.

I too prefer the median_low naming rather than median.low. I'm not sure I can articulate why, but certainly the fact that that latter isn't used anywhere else in the stdlib that I can think of is probably a lot of it :)

Perhaps the underlying thought is that we don't use classes pure function namespaces: we expect classes to be something more than that.

--David

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