On 3/30/11 1:54 PM, Mark Dickinson wrote:
For myself, I have mixed feelings on the proposed addition: while I can see how the half-precision floats would be useful in NumPy, it's not so clear that they'd be useful to Python itself. It feels a little bit odd to have NumPy driving Python additions that may not be of that much interest to non-NumPy users.
Like Ellipsis, multidimensional extended slicing, complex numbers, and non-bool rich comparisons? :-) I think the major point in its favor is that PEP 3118 defines a protocol for third party libraries to communicate, the most notable of which really was numpy. Python itself needs only a subset of that, which was mostly already capably handled by the old buffer protocol. Still, it's worth defining the standard to allow third parties to communicate the full spectrum of things they want to tell each other. -- Robert Kern "I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth." -- Umberto Eco