[SciPy-user] Finding complex roots of complex polynomials in newscipy

[Fernando Perez]

Fernando Perez wrote:

> I tracked this down to the following behavior in the scipy type hierarchy. 
> This looks to me like a bug, unless I'm missing something:
> 
> In [14]: zarr = scipy.array([1j,2j])
> 
> In [15]: zarr.dtype
> Out[15]: <type 'complex128_arrtype'>
> 
> In [16]: isinstance(zarr.dtype,scipy.complexfloating)
> Out[16]: False

OK, a bit more info.  I found that:

In [17]: isinstance(zarr.dtype(),scipy.complexfloating)
Out[17]: True

[Note the call on dtype]

This is in fact how regular python works:

In [26]: isinstance(int,int)
Out[26]: False

In [27]: isinstance(int(),int)
Out[27]: True

However, where scipy differs from python is here:

In [28]: iarr = scipy.arange(2)

In [29]: isinstance(iarr,scipy.integer)
Out[29]: False

So in order to do typechecking via isinstance(), we seem to be forced to make 
a function call (expensive):

In [30]: isinstance(iarr.dtype,scipy.integer)
Out[30]: False

In [31]: isinstance(iarr.dtype(),scipy.integer)
Out[31]: True


I'm not exactly sure what Travis' intent was in here.  But it would seem to me 
that [29] above should have come out True, if arrays are to be as similar to 
standard python objects as possible in terms of type handling.  But as I said, 
I don't know the structure of the type hierarchy code well enough to say 
whether this is feasible or not.

Cheers,

f