confusing default behavior of print for bound method

[MLopez-Ibanez]

Code Sample, a copy-pastable example if possible

# Your code here
import pandas as pd
x = pd.DataFrame([[0,1],[3,2]])
x.mean

Problem description

The above prints

<bound method DataFrame.mean of    0  1
0  0  1
1  3  2>

I don't see the point of printing the actual dataframe content. With large data frames, the output above is even more confusing. This is very confusing for beginners.

Expected Output

<bound method DataFrame.mean>

Output of pd.show_versions()

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit: None
python: 3.5.2.final.0
python-bits: 64
OS: Linux
OS-release: 4.15.0-33-generic
machine: x86_64
processor: x86_64
byteorder: little
LC_ALL: None
LANG: en_GB.UTF-8
LOCALE: en_GB.UTF-8

pandas: 0.23.1
pytest: None
pip: 18.1
setuptools: 40.5.0
Cython: None
numpy: 1.14.5
scipy: 0.17.0
pyarrow: None
xarray: None
IPython: 7.1.1
sphinx: 1.3.6
patsy: 0.5.0
dateutil: 2.7.3
pytz: 2018.5
blosc: None
bottleneck: None
tables: 3.2.2
numexpr: 2.4.3
feather: None
matplotlib: 3.0.2
openpyxl: None
xlrd: None
xlwt: None
xlsxwriter: 0.7.3
lxml: None
bs4: 4.4.1
html5lib: 0.999
sqlalchemy: None
pymysql: None
psycopg2: None
jinja2: 2.8
s3fs: None
fastparquet: None
pandas_gbq: None
pandas_datareader: None

[TomAugspurger]

It doesn't seem like there's an easy way to change the repr of a bound method: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21344862/can-i-change-a-python-bound-method-objects-str-attribute, or am I reading that wrong?

[MLopez-Ibanez]

NumPy seems to work-around this issue somehow:

import numpy as np
a = np.array([1])
a.mean

prints

<function ndarray.mean>

and

a.__repr__

prints

<method-wrapper '__repr__' of numpy.ndarray object at 0x7fbac86b9670>

[TomAugspurger]

Is that because ndarray is implemented in C?

[mroeschke]

Thanks for the issue, but it appears this hasn't gotten traction in a while so closing