Terminology

The most common class in both dask-awkward and awkward-array is the Array class. In dask-awkward the Array class provides a Dask collection representing a partitioned and lazily computed version of the awkward-array Array class. To help mitigate confusion between dask-awkward and awkward-array, we try to maintain a clear distinction between objects in both projects.

First, dask-awkward adopts dak as the standard import alias:

import dask_awkward as dak

We will always follow the standard import alias for awkward as well:

import awkward as ak

With the imports in mind, we will never have an unqualified Array object in the documentation, all instances will be either dak.Array or ak.Array. We also discourage importing the objects from the namespaces:

# don't do this!
from dask_awkward import Array

# or this!
from awkward import Array

In written descriptions, we’ll sometimes refer to the awkward-array Array object as a “concrete array”, “materialized array”, or an “eager array”. The dask-awkward object will be referred to as an “array collection” or a “lazy array”.

Finally, the result of calling the compute() method on a dak.Array object will almost always result in an ak.Array object.