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

[Travis Oliphant]

 +1

--
(mobile phone of)
Travis Oliphant
Enthought, Inc.
1-512-536-1057
http://www.enthought.com

On Dec 9, 2010, at 2:29 PM, Pauli Virtanen <pav at iki.fi> wrote:

> 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> SciPy-Dev mailing list
> SciPy-Dev at scipy.org
> http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/scipy-dev