[SciPy-dev] Question about 64-bit integers being cast to double precision

[Fernando Perez]

Travis Oliphant wrote:
> Fernando Perez wrote:

>>Since the 'mental slot' is already in scipy's users heads for saying 'modify 
>>the default output of this function to accumulate/store data in a different 
>>type', I think it would be reasonable to offer
>>
>>sqrt(a,rtype=float)
>> 
>>
> 
> One thing we could do is take advantage of the "indexing capabilities" 
> of the ufunc object which are unused at the moment and do something like
> 
> sqrt[float](a)
> 
> Where the argument to the index would be the desired output type or 
> something.

This one is a bit intriguing.  I kind of like it, but I worry that it's a bit 
too unique of a usage.  I've never seen this kind of use elsewhere in python 
code 'in the wild', and I wonder if it's not too orthogonal to common usage to 
force people to learn this particular special case.

Cheers,

f