"Stepping stone" modules shouldn't be exposed in the namespace #2974
Description
We have lots of functions, like ak.sum and ak.concatenate, but we shouldn't be cluttering the namespace with things like ak.ak_sum and ak.ak_concatenate:
print("\n".join(x for x in dir(ak) if x.startswith("ak_")))Details
ak_all ak_almost_equal ak_any ak_argcartesian ak_argcombinations ak_argmax ak_argmin ak_argsort ak_backend ak_broadcast_arrays ak_broadcast_fields ak_cartesian ak_categories ak_combinations ak_concatenate ak_copy ak_corr ak_count ak_count_nonzero ak_covar ak_drop_none ak_enforce_type ak_fields ak_fill_none ak_firsts ak_flatten ak_from_arrow ak_from_arrow_schema ak_from_avro_file ak_from_buffers ak_from_categorical ak_from_cupy ak_from_dlpack ak_from_feather ak_from_iter ak_from_jax ak_from_json ak_from_numpy ak_from_parquet ak_from_rdataframe ak_from_regular ak_full_like ak_is_categorical ak_is_none ak_is_tuple ak_is_valid ak_isclose ak_linear_fit ak_local_index ak_mask ak_max ak_mean ak_merge_option_of_records ak_merge_union_of_records ak_metadata_from_parquet ak_min ak_moment ak_nan_to_none ak_nan_to_num ak_num ak_ones_like ak_pad_none ak_parameters ak_prod ak_ptp ak_ravel ak_run_lengths ak_singletons ak_softmax ak_sort ak_std ak_strings_astype ak_sum ak_to_arrow ak_to_arrow_table ak_to_backend ak_to_buffers ak_to_cupy ak_to_dataframe ak_to_feather ak_to_jax ak_to_json ak_to_layout ak_to_list ak_to_numpy ak_to_packed ak_to_parquet ak_to_rdataframe ak_to_regular ak_transform ak_type ak_unflatten ak_unzip ak_validity_error ak_values_astype ak_var ak_where ak_with_field ak_with_name ak_with_parameter ak_without_field ak_without_parameters ak_zeros_like ak_zip
print("\n".join(x for x in dir(ak.str) if x.startswith("akstr_")))Details
akstr_capitalize akstr_center akstr_count_substring akstr_count_substring_regex akstr_ends_with akstr_extract_regex akstr_find_substring akstr_find_substring_regex akstr_index_in akstr_is_alnum akstr_is_alpha akstr_is_ascii akstr_is_decimal akstr_is_digit akstr_is_in akstr_is_lower akstr_is_numeric akstr_is_printable akstr_is_space akstr_is_title akstr_is_upper akstr_join akstr_join_element_wise akstr_length akstr_lower akstr_lpad akstr_ltrim akstr_ltrim_whitespace akstr_match_like akstr_match_substring akstr_match_substring_regex akstr_repeat akstr_replace_slice akstr_replace_substring akstr_replace_substring_regex akstr_reverse akstr_rpad akstr_rtrim akstr_rtrim_whitespace akstr_slice akstr_split_pattern akstr_split_pattern_regex akstr_split_whitespace akstr_starts_with akstr_swapcase akstr_title akstr_to_categorical akstr_trim akstr_trim_whitespace akstr_upper
These two sets can be removed without fanfare. (If any users are accessing ak.sum as ak.ak_sum.sum, they should be corrected!)
We should probably also get rid of the visibility of "stepping stone" modules like ak.operations, although this one would require a deprecation cycle because it has been used in our tests, and some users might have adopted it for that reason. It can be deprecated by moving operations to _operations and creating a new operations that provides everything through a __getattr__ (PEP-562) that raises a warning.
Ideally, there should be only one correct path to each public API function.
It would also end up removing this:
awkward/src/awkward/__init__.py
Lines 52 to 53 in f9a29ef