[Matrix-SIG] Numeric Nits

[Christos Siopis]

On Thu, 24 Jun 1999, Konrad Hinsen wrote:

> > However, just to play devil's advocate, suppose a new user *does* know
> > that Python natively only supports doubles and that upcasting is the
> > normal behavior --then s/he might be confused that the result is a float.
> 
> That's why this would be a special-purpose *additional* float32 type.
> New users wouldn't know about it and not use it, and those who do use
> it are supposed to know why!
> 
> ....
> 
> > Furthermore, if types such as bytes, shorts, etc. are also introduced,
> > figuring out the resulting type might get messy, e.g. would
> 
> Indeed. Again, new users are not supposed to mess around with this.

I would be somewhat reluctant to make this distinction between new and
experienced users. I think it has more to do with what one is working on
rather than his/her level of experience. Someone doing number crunching,
whether new or experienced, would most probably not have to deal with
multiple data types beyong what NumPy currently supports. However, someone
doing data analysis could well need access to 8-bit or 16-bit integers
from day one (e.g., if I have an RGB color datacube with 8-bit depth, I
might get annoyed if it is *automatically* converted to Int32 and then I'd
have to convert it back to Int8 to save it and so on).

Christos