[SciPy-dev] Notes from meeting with Guido regarding inclusion of array package in Python core

[Perry Greenfield]

On Mar 10, 2005, at 2:41 PM, Charles R Harris wrote:
>
> I agree that this is a difficult problem and it is hard to make a
> decision. I think the simplest solution is to return rank-0 arrays. 
> Once
> people get used to this it should seem natural and obviate all that
> checking that currently goes on. Overhead is a concern, but I suspect
> that the heavy computation lifting will be done by the array routines,
> not python code. However, it is important to make sure it is easy to
> write extensions so things can be prototyped in python, then made
> efficient with an extension. One further problem with this approach is
> that python types need to be cast to suitable types for the array. When
> working with, say, a float array and multiplying by a python 1.0, it
> would be undesirable to return the result as a double. Using rank-0
> arrays preserves the type info, but for python scalars perhaps we need
> some simple typecast functions so that one can write 
> Int16(pythonScalar)
> and get the appropriate scalar to use in a numeric routine. Perhaps a
> special Numeric3 scalar type would be appropriate and address the
> efficiency problems.
>
Actually, the coercion issue is already handled by the fact that either 
numarray or Numeric3 arrays don't allow scalars to force coercion of 
arrays unless the scalar is of a "higher" kind than arrays (e.g., float 
scalar with int array). So multiplying an Int16 array with the constant 
3 won't change the result to Int32.


Perry