On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Travis Oliphant wrote:
Frankly, I have no idea what the implimentation details would be, but could we get rid of rank-0 arrays altogether? I have always simply found them strange and confusing... What are they really neccesary for (besides holding scalar values of different precision that standard Pyton scalars)?
With new coercion rules this becomes a possibility. Arguments against it are that special rank-0 arrays behave as more consistent numbers with the rest of Numeric than Python scalars. In other words they have a length and a shape and one can right N-dimensional code that works the same even when the result is a scalar.
In addition, rank-0 arrays are mutable while Python scalars are not. Mutability is sometimes useful (e.g. when emulating C or Fortran calls in Python) but often also evil due to its unpythonic side effect. Pearu