Re: Lazy expression evaluation

From: Dave Allured <dave.allured_at_nyahnyahspammersnyahnyah>
Date: Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:04:18 -0600

Dave B,

On the other hand, the missing value rule for general expressions,
logical and others, is elegantly stated on the Expressions page:

   "When any NCL expression is being evaluated, NCL ignores
   elements that are equal to the value of the "_FillValue"
   attribute for each variable. When a missing value is
   ignored, the result of the expression will contain a
   missing value at the corresponding array index."

There are other contexts in which I would really not want to have
complications added to this rule. With full knowledge I would
probably vote for keeping logical expressions in conformance with
this simple rule.

This means that (a) a logical expression within an "if" statement
must explicitly be an exception to this rule, with some
dimensionality and nesting considerations; and (b) the assignment
statement for check1 below is not in compliance, and might be a bug
(which you already said).

This is reminding me of a saying, "Be careful what you ask for!"

--Dave

Dave Allured wrote:
> Dave B,
>
> Thanks for looking at this. I think that lazy expression evaluation
> for array expressions would be beneficial.
>
> It seems to me that that lazy evaluation was never implemented in
> NCL just for "if" statements. Lazy evaluation also works in general
> scalar expressions, just not in array expressions. In this example
> for current NCL versions, check1 is a scalar expression assignment
> which could not have the indicated result without lazy evaluation:
>
> a = (/ 1,2,3 /)
> a@_FillValue = 2
> check1 = (.not.ismissing(a(1)) .and. (a(1) .gt. 0))
> check2 = (.not.ismissing(a) .and. (a .gt. 0))
>
> print (check1)
> print (check2(1))
>
> (0) False
> (0) Missing
>
> Also I see in the same documentation under "if statements", there is
> an almost explicit reference to using the ismissing function in
> array mode with lazy expression evaluation. "The function ismissing
> returns an array ..." "Combined with lazy conditional expression
> evaluation..." There are other suggestive statements in the same
> section. This seems like simply an incomplete implementation of
> lazy evaluation.
>
> Meanwhile, here is a workaround that I have started to use. This
> needs only one extra line, and it does not depend on lazy
> evaluation. x is an array; the output vmask is also an array of the
> same dimensionality:
>
> vmask = (x .gt. -130. .and. x .lt. 130.)
> vmask = where (ismissing (vmask), False, vmask)
>
> This is surely not as efficient as true lazy evaluation in a single
> line, but it will do for now.
>
> --Dave
>
> David Brown wrote:
>> Hi Dave,
>>
>> This is a very interesting observation. In the NCL reference manual lazy
>> expression evaluation is only documented in the context of 'if'
>> statements, which require a scalar logical expression. The documentation
>> for '.and.' and '.or.' says only that the operands must be logical, but
>> does not mention lazy evaluation. Apparently lazy evaluation was
>> implemented specifically for 'if' statement evaluation but was never
>> generalized to work for array logical expressions.
>>
>> This leads to the inconsistency that you have pointed out here. The code
>> could easily be updated to use lazy evaluation for .and. and .or. in the
>> context of array logical expressions. I am not totally confident that
>> there might not be some backwards-compatibility issue, but it does seem
>> like a bug of sorts, so my inclination is to go ahead and make the
>> change, noting that the behavior should be clearly documented. The
>> development team will discuss.
>> -dave
>>
>>
>> On Jun 12, 2009, at 7:22 PM, Dave Allured wrote:
>>
>>> NCL team,
>>>
>>> Is lazy expression evaluation supposed to work for array expressions?
>>>
>>> See attached script. mask1 is scalar and shows the expected result.
>>> This is basically the example in the NCL manual under "If statements",
>>> with assignment rather than if statement.
>>>
>>> http://www.ncl.ucar.edu/Document/Manuals/Ref_Manual/NclStatements.shtml
>>>
>>> For mask2 I expect True, False, True, but NCL returns True, Missing,
>>> True. This creates problems for subsequent usage of the mask.
>>>
>>> I checked this with NCL versions 5.0.1 (pre-release, ca. May 2008) and
>>> 5.1.1 (pre-release). The problem was the same in both.
>>>
>>> uname -a
>>> Darwin mac56.psd.esrl.noaa.gov 9.7.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.7.0: Tue
>>> Mar 31 22:54:29 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1228.12.14~1/RELEASE_PPC Power
>>> Macintosh powerpc PowerMac7,3 Darwin
>>>
>>> Please advise. Thank you for taking a look.
>>>
>>> Dave Allured
>>> CU/CIRES Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC)
>>> http://cires.colorado.edu/science/centers/cdc/
>>> NOAA/ESRL/PSD, Climate Analysis Branch (CAB)
>>> http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/psd1/
>>> ; Test program for lazy expression evaluation.
>>> ; 2009-jun-13 By Dave Allured, NOAA/PSD/CU/CIRES/CDC.
>>>
>>> begin
>>> a = (/ 1,2,3 /)
>>> a@_FillValue = 2
>>>
>>> i=1
>>> mask1 = (.not.ismissing(a(i)) .and. (a(i) .gt. 0))
>>> print (mask1)
>>>
>>> mask2 = (.not.ismissing(a) .and. (a .gt. 0))
>>> print (mask2)
>>> end
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Received on Tue Jun 16 2009 - 19:04:18 MDT

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