On Wed, Jul 25, 2018 at 4:02 PM Stefan van der Walt <stefanv@berkeley.edu> wrote:

Hi Chris,

On Wed, 25 Jul 2018 08:13:26 -0700, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal wrote:
> For example, I am very wary of putting a non-fixed width encoding (e.g.
> Utf-8) in a fixed width field.
>
> But this PR is not the place to discuss that.

Since you've followed that discussion closely, can you push a commit to
my PR with text that more accurately captures the situation?

Thanks!
Stéfan

Hi Chris,

Obviously the string dtype proposal in the roadmap is only a sketch at this point :).

I do think that options listed currently (encoded strings with fixed-width storage and variable length strings) cover the breadth of proposals from last time. We may not want to implement all of them in NumPy, but I think we can agree that there are use cases for all them, even if only as external dtypes?

Would it help to add "and/or" after the first bullet? Mostly I care about having like to have "improve string dtypes" in some form on the roadmap, and thought it would be helpful to list the concrete proposals that I recall. The actual design choices (especially if we proposal to change any default behavior) will certainly need a NEP.

Best,

Stephan