[Cython] memoryview slices can't be None?

[mark florisson]

On 2 February 2012 21:38, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
<d.s.seljebotn at astro.uio.no> wrote:
> On 02/02/2012 10:16 PM, mark florisson wrote:
>>
>> On 2 February 2012 12:19, Dag Sverre Seljebotn
>> <d.s.seljebotn at astro.uio.no>  wrote:
>>>
>>> I just realized that
>>>
>>> cdef int[:] a = None
>>>
>>> raises an exception; even though I'd argue that 'a' is of the "reference"
>>> kind of type where Cython usually allow None (i.e., "cdef MyClass b =
>>> None"
>>> is allowed even if type(None) is NoneType). Is this a bug or not, and is
>>> it
>>> possible to do something about it?
>>>
>>> Dag Sverre
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> cython-devel mailing list
>>> cython-devel at python.org
>>> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/cython-devel
>>
>>
>> Yeah I disabled that quite early. It was supposed to be working but
>> gave a lot of trouble in cases (segfaults, mainly). At the time I was
>> trying to get rid of all the segfaults and get the basic functionality
>> working, so I disabled it. Personally, I have never liked how things
>
>
> Well, you can segfault quite easily with
>
> cdef MyClass a = None
> print a.field
>
> so it doesn't make sense to slices different from cdef classes IMO.
>
>
>> can be None unchecked. I personally prefer to write
>>
>> cdef foo(obj=None):
>>     cdef int[:] a
>>     if obj is None:
>>         obj = ...
>>     a = obj
>>
>> Often you forget to write 'not None' when declaring the parameter (and
>> apparently that it only allowed for 'def' functions).
>>
>> As such, I never bothered to re-enable it. However, it does support
>> control flow with uninitialized slices, and will raise an error if it
>> is uninitialized. Do we want this behaviour (e.g. for consistency)?
>
>
> When in doubt, go for consistency. So +1 for that reason. I do believe that
> setting stuff to None is rather vital in Python.

Yeah I think we should go back to this discussion :) Checking for None
and allowing slices to be None is simply  very convenient, and doesn't
involve any drastic changes. I was never really against it, I just
never got around to implementing it.

> What I typically do is more like this:
>
> def f(double[:] input, double[:] out=None):
>    if out is None:
>        out = np.empty_like(input)
>    ...
>
> Having to use another variable name is a bit of a pain. (Come on -- do you
> use "a" in real code? What do you actually call "the other obj"? I sometimes
> end up with "out_" and so on, but it creates smelly code quite quickly.)
>
> It's easy to segfault with cdef classes anyway, so decent nonechecking
> should be implemented at some point, and then memoryviews would use the same
> mechanisms. Java has decent null-checking...
>
>
> Dag Sverre
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