Need a way to add entire rows to tables.

[jeromekelleher]

When adding rows to tables we do a lot of things like

tables.nodes.add_row(flags=node.flags, time=node.time, ...)

It would be simpler and more future proof if we had a keyword-only arg (that can't be supplied with any other argument), row which contains all the relevant values:

tables.nodes.add_row(row=node)

Annoyingly, we can't do this because there's some add_row methods that have mandatory positional arguments, and the others have fixed numeric values for defaults in the signatures.

We could have a new method called add(row) which does this? I'm not that keen on the name though, it's really doing the same thing as add_row, just being parameterised differently.

I guess if we're going to take the Python list analogy further, we should probably call this method append?

[jeromekelleher]

Actually, append seems good. Any objections? This would save us a lot of annoying code, I think.

[benjeffery]

Might as a well go the whole hog and also implement extend from the python list too?

[jeromekelleher]

Yep, good idea.

[petrelharp]

That would be nice. What kind of an object would node be?

[jeromekelleher]

Anything that Duck-types to the required attributes, so we could either pass in a NodeTableRow or (I think) a Node.

[jeromekelleher]

Similarly, we should add x_table_append(table, object) to the C API, i.e.,

tsk_individual_table_append(tsk_individual_table_t *table, individual_t *object);

There's quite a few places we'd make the code cleaner with this. We could also add an x_table_extend(table, num_objects, *objects), but I'm not sure how useful that would actually be.