On Fri, Jun 7, 2019 at 1:37 AM Nathaniel Smith <njs@pobox.com> wrote:

My intuition is that what users actually want is for *native Python
types* to be treated as having 'underspecified' dtypes, e.g. int is
happy to coerce to int8/int32/int64/whatever, float is happy to coerce
to float32/float64/whatever, but once you have a fully-specified numpy
dtype, it should stay.

Thanks Nathaniel, I think this expresses a possible solution better than anything I've seen on this list before. An explicit "underspecified types" concept could make casting understandable.

In any case, it would probably be helpful to start by just writing
down the whole set of rules we have now, because I'm not sure anyone
understands all the details...

Ralf