[SciPy-dev] Big changes to trunk later today

[Travis Oliphant]

This is a warning that I will be making the type-handling changes to the 
trunk later today.  There may be some new bugs introduced at that point 
(I had to go back and think about reference counting for all the type 
usage since what was once PyArray_Typecode * is now PyArray_Descr * and 
a regular Python object) ---  changes this size can always introduce new 
bugs.

If you have any changes to commit to the trunk, please do so within the 
hour (or email me to hold off the merge).   

I'm very enthused about the change.  Besides the new feature of being 
able to describe any kind of array data type (e.g. nested records of 
arrays of records...), several awkward things simplified in the code 
(and several C-API calls became macros).  This seems to indicate to me 
that this is the right move. 

I've also updated the PEP stored at

http://svn.scipy.org/svn/PEP

to reflect the new PyArray_Descr * structure that goes along with the 
change.  I think the new structure is complete enough that it should go 
into Python itself along with the generic multidimensional array.

Best,

-Travis