Testing for scalar indexes from to_indices

Internals & Design
,
1

I wonder if there is an API for testing if something returned by to_indices is a “scalar” index (ie one that would drop dimensions). I could not find anything, and I think it would be useful to have, and thought I would ask here before making a PR before the 1.2 feature freeze.

One can of course rely on the documentation and note that currently “scalar” indexes are Int or CartesianIndex. But this may change in the future, just like CartesianIndex was introduced.

The proposal is something trivial like

is_scalar_index(::Integer) = true
is_scalar_index(::CartesianIndex) = true
is_scalar_index(_) = false

An MWE for some context is

"""
Wrapper for vectors, supports subsetting via [].
"""
struct Foo
    a # both are <: AbtractVector, but here omit
    b # type parameters to simplify example
    function Foo(a, b)
        @assert axes(a) == axes(b)
        new(a, b)
    end
end

Base.firstindex(f::Foo) = firstindex(f.a)

Base.lastindex(f::Foo) = lastindex(f.a)

function Base.getindex(f::Foo, i)
    ι = first(to_indices(f.a, (i, )))
    if ι isa Union{Integer, CartesianIndex} # this would be more robust
        error("subset using non-scalar indexes")
    else
        Foo(f.a[ι], f.b[ι])
    end
end

with

julia> f = Foo(1:5, ones(5))
Foo(1:5, [1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0])

julia> f[2:3]
Foo(2:3, [1.0, 1.0])

julia> f[2]
ERROR: subset using non-scalar indexes
Stacktrace:
 [1] error(::String) at ./error.jl:33
 [2] getindex(::Foo, ::Int64) at ./REPL[19]:4
 [3] top-level scope at REPL[27]:1