Alexander Belopolsky wrote:
Travis Oliphant <oliphant.travis <at> ieee.org> writes:
Don't lump those ideas together. Shapes and strides are necessary for N-dimensional array's (it's essentially what *defines* the N-dimensional array). I really don't want to sacrifice those in the extended buffer protocol. If you want to separate them into different functions then that is a possibility.
I don't understand. Do you want to discuss shapes and strides separately from the datatype or not? Note that in ctypes shape is a property of datatype (as in c_int*2*3). In your proposal, shapes and strides are communicated separately. This presents a unique memory management challenge: if the object does not contain shape information in a ready to be pointed to form, who is responsible for deallocating the shape array?
Perhaps a "view object" should be returned like /F suggests and it manages the shape, strides, and data-format.
If we manage to agree on the standard way to pass primitive type information, it will be a big achievement and immediately useful because simple arrays are already in the standard library.
We could start there, I suppose. Especially if it helps us all get on the same page.
Let's start:
- Should primitive types be associated with simple type codes (short, int, long,
float, double) or type/size pairs [(int,16), (int, 32), (int, 64), (float, 32), (float, 64)]? - I prefer pairs
- Should primitive type codes be characters or integers (from an enum) at
C level? - I prefer integers
Are these orthogonal?
- Should size be expressed in bits or bytes?
- I prefer bits
So, you want an integer enum for the "kind" and an integer for the bitsize? That's fine with me.
One thing I just remembered. We have T_UBYTE and T_BYTE, etc. defined in structmember.h already. Should we just re-use those #defines while adding to them to make an easy to use interface for primitive types?
-Travis