[SciPy-Dev] fwrap refactor: What about complex -> real?

[Pauli Virtanen]

Thu, 09 Dec 2010 20:11:56 +0100, Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:
> When faced with Fortran functions expecting a real scalar, f2py will
> happily accept complex numbers and silently discard the imaginary part.
> 
> Is this really the preferred behaviour? It would take quite a bit of
> work to have fwrap behave like that, and I've heard occasional
> complaints about the behaviour earlier (can't say I'm fond of it myself
> either).

IMHO, it's not a desired behavior. We are probably working towards 
addressing this issue in Numpy. Even the idea of disallowing implicit 
real->complex cast for Numpy 2.0 has been floated around.

Personally, I don't see it worthwhile trying to emulate f2py here if it's 
not trivial. Scipy is not as frozen as Numpy anyway, so I believe 
changing this would not be a problem.

> (Note that Python implements ".real" on float objects, so the fix is in
> all cases trivial when this breaks things for people, one just appends
> ".real" when calling the function, which should also increase the
> readability of the code.)

Yes, this is true. Also in this case explicit is better than implicit.

-- 
Pauli Virtanen