On Fri, Jan 18, 2013 at 4:39 AM, Olivier Delalleau <shish@keba.be> wrote:
Le vendredi 18 janvier 2013, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal a écrit :
If you check again the examples in this thread exhibiting surprising / unexpected behavior, you'll notice most of them are with integers. The tricky thing about integers is that downcasting can dramatically change your result. With floats, not so much: you get approximation errors (usually what you want) and the occasional nan / inf creeping in (usally noticeable).
fair enough. However my core argument is that people use non-standard (usually smaller) dtypes for a reason, and it should be hard to accidentally up-cast. This is in contrast with the argument that accidental down-casting can produce incorrect results, and thus it should be hard to accidentally down-cast -- same argument whether the incorrect results are drastic or not.... It's really a question of which of these we think should be prioritized. -Chris -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov