[Pytables-users] clean up Table addressing?

[Norbert N. <Nor...@gm...>]

Hi there,

just been working with tables a bit. The methods of the Table class and the 
parameters they take (especially the naming) utterly confuse me. Some 
examples:

* as I understand it, modifyRows and modifyColumns do nearly the same thing, 
except that the latter variant gives the additional flexibility of modifying 
only certain rows. Why not drop the first variant and rename the latter 
to .modify(...) ?

* the parameter names modifyRows(rows=...) and modifyColumns(columns=...) are 
badly confusing. The name 'data' for this parameter would be much more 
intuitive

* why is the parameter of read() called 'field' - I think we are talking of 
columns.

* If modifyColumns() allows to select an arbitrary number of columns, why is 
read() restricted to all or one? Hopefully, the parameters read(field=...) 
and modifyColumns(names=...) should be unified and given the same semantics.

* why does one single routine 'read' support both start,stop,step and coords, 
while iterrators do need two different names for that?

* all the routines addressing rows take some (seemingly) arbitrary subset of 
{start, stop, step, coords, sequence, condition}. Intuitively, I would expect 
a set of routines to read, modify, remove and iterate that take the same 
uniform addressing with the same semantics. It is really irritating if you 
first think you could use some addressing and then realize that, for some 
unknown reason, 'remove' does not support step=

I could probably go on like this, but I think I'll better stop here. There 
certainly are good reasons for some of the points I mentioned, but I guess, 
other newbies would wonder about exactly the same points, so it might yet be 
worth reconsidering them.

Ciao,
Norbert

-- 
_________________________________________Norbert Nemec
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