issue_comments: 658140708

This data as json

html_url issue_url id node_id user created_at updated_at author_association body reactions performed_via_github_app issue
https://github.com/pydata/xarray/pull/4221#issuecomment-658140708 https://api.github.com/repos/pydata/xarray/issues/4221 658140708 MDEyOklzc3VlQ29tbWVudDY1ODE0MDcwOA== 3460034 2020-07-14T12:03:05Z 2020-07-14T12:03:19Z CONTRIBUTOR

Revisiting it I now realize that is_array_like is actually not a good name for that function: officially, "array_like" means that it can be casted using np.asarray. Maybe we should rename that to is_duck_array? But then we'd also need to check for __array_ufunc__ and __array_function__ because we also need those to properly wrap duck arrays.

As long as that doesn't break any of the current uses, I think that would be the best way forwards. This would require xarray to be on NumPy 1.16+ (in order to ensure hasattr(np.ndarray, "__array_function__"), but that's only 9 days away by NEP 29, so hopefully that isn't too much of an issue. Then, most of the checks for "can this be wrapped by xarray" should be able to become something like

python is_duck_array(x) and not isinstance(x, (DataArray, Variable)) with is_duck_dask_array only being needed for checking Dask Array-like support.

Although, while we're at it, do we also need more careful handling of upcast types? I'm not sure if there even are any out there right now (not sure if a HoloViews Dataset counts here), but that doesn't necessarily mean there never will be any.

 
{
    "total_count": 0,
    "+1": 0,
    "-1": 0,
    "laugh": 0,
    "hooray": 0,
    "confused": 0,
    "heart": 0,
    "rocket": 0,
    "eyes": 0
}
   656163384