On Fri, Feb 21, 2020 at 8:52 AM Stephan Hoyer <shoyer@gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Feb 20, 2020 at 12:41 PM Steve Jorgensen <stevej@stevej.name> wrote:
Christopher Barker wrote: ...
Perhaps the OP wanted the internal array size initialized, but not used. Currently the internal array will automatically be reallocated to grow as needed. Which could be a performance hit if you know it’s going to grow large. But frankly, it would be a rare case where this would be noticeable. -CHB
Maybe uncommon, but I don't know about rare. Let's say you want to perform list-wise computations, making new lists with results of operations on existing lists (similar to numpy, but maybe trying to do something numpy is unsuitable for)? You would want to pre-allocate the new array to the size of the operand arrays.
Strong +1 for an array.zeros() constructor, and/or a lower level array.empty() which doesn't pre-fill values.
So it'd be a shorthand for something like this?
array.array("i", bytes(64)) array('i', [0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0])
It'd be convenient to specify the size as a number of array elements rather than bytes. But I'm not a heavy user of array.array() so I won't say either way as to whether this is needed. ChrisA