[Numpy-discussion] Re: Bytes Object and Metadata

[Perry Greenfield]

On Mar 28, 2005, at 6:59 PM, Travis Oliphant wrote:
>>       The struct module convention for denoting native, portable
>>       big endian, and portable little endian is concise and 
>> documented.
>>
> So, you think we should put the byte-order in the typecharacter 
> interface.   Don't know.... could be persuaded.
>

I think we need to think about what the typecharacter is supposed to 
represent. Is it the value as the user will see it or to indicate what 
the internal representation is? These are two different things. Then 
again, I'm not sure how this info is exposed to the user; if it is 
appropriately handled by intermediate code it may not matter. For 
example, if this corresponds to what the user will see for the type, I 
think it is bad. Most of the time they don't care what the internal 
representation is, they just want to know if it is Int16 or whatever; 
with the two combined, they have to test for both variants.

Perry