On Mon, Jan 7, 2019, 14:22 Feng Yu <rainwoodman@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Was it ever brought up the possibility of a new array class (ndrefonly, ndview) that is strictly no copy?
All operations on ndrefonly will return ndrefonly and if the operation cannot be completed without making a copy, it shall throw an error.
On the implementation there are two choices if we use subclasses:
- ndrefonly can be a subclass of ndarray. The pattern would be subclass limiting functionality of super, but ndrefonly is a ndarray. - ndarray as a subclass of ndarray. Subclass supplements functionality of super. : ndarray will not throw an error when a copy is necessary. However ndarray is not a ndarray.
If we want to be wild they do not even need to be subclasses of each other, or maybe they shall both be subclasses of something more fundamental.
- Yu
I would prefer a flag for this. Someone can make an array read-only by setting `arr.flags.writable=False`. So along those lines, we could have a `arr.flags.copyable` flag that if set to `False` would result in an error of any operation tried to copy the data.