[SciPy-dev] Inconsisten return type from discrete dists.

[Otto Tronarp]

Hello,

I started looking on writing some unit tests anyway. While doing that I
discovered that the return type from discrete distributions where
inconsistent or rather they all seems to return floats except for
randint. Further, some of them also returns a array of length 1 when
called without size argument while others return a simple number.

For the first issue I feel that it is more natural for them to return
ints, the attached patch, return_ints.pathc, fixes that.

For the second issue I think that it is more convenient if they always
returns an array. I have no patch for that, but I can fix it if that is
the consensus.

While I wrote the unit tests I also found more bugs. There seem to be a
missing function in rv.py, namley _check_shape. By the look of how it's
used  it should do something like this:

def _check_shape(size):
    if isinstance(size, tuple):
        Ns = reduce(operator.mul, size)
    else:
        Ns = size
    return (size, Ns)

Attached patch, missing_check_shape.patch, fixes that.

I also have a couple of question on coding guide lines. 

1 - What is the correct way to check if a array is of integer type? 
2 - What is the correct way to call things from Numeric? i.e.
scipy.shape(a) or Numeric.shape(a)?


Regards,
Otto
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