issues: 469440752

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id node_id number title user state locked assignee milestone comments created_at updated_at closed_at author_association active_lock_reason draft pull_request body reactions performed_via_github_app state_reason repo type
469440752 MDU6SXNzdWU0Njk0NDA3NTI= 3139 Change the signature of DataArray to DataArray(data, dims, coords, ...)? 1217238 open 0     1 2019-07-17T20:54:57Z 2022-04-09T15:28:51Z   MEMBER      

Currently, the signature of DataArray is DataArray(data, coords, dims, ...): http://xarray.pydata.org/en/stable/generated/xarray.DataArray.html

In the long term, I think DataArray(data, dims, coords, ...) would be more intuitive: dimensions are a more fundamental part of xarray's data model than coordinates. Certainly I find it much more common to omit coords than to omit dims when I create a DataArray.

My original reasoning for this argument order was that dims could be copied from coords, e.g., DataArray(new_data, old_dataarray.coords), and it was nice to be able to pass this sole argument by position instead of by name. But a cleaner way to write this now is old_dataarray.copy(data=new_data).

The challenge in making any change here would be to have a smooth deprecation process, and that ideally avoids requiring users to rewrite all of their code and avoids loads of pointless/extraneous warnings. I'm not entirely sure this is possible. We could likely use heuristics to distinguish between dims and coords arguments regardless of their order, but this probably isn't something we would want to preserve in the long term.

An alternative that might achieve some of the convenience of this change would be to allow for passing lists of strings in the coords argument by position, which are interpreted as dimensions, e.g., DataArray(data, ['x', 'y']). The downside of this alternative is that it would add even more special cases to the DataArray constructor , which would make it harder to understand.

 
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