On Wed, Sep 23, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Sturla Molden <sturla@molden.no> wrote:
David Cournapeau skrev:
It can be a full rewrite, but still should be sent as patches. If I am the one to review, I would prefer this way. That's especially important to track regressions.
Well.. I didn't intend this for inclusion in SciPy, at least not in the beginning. I needed it for some neuroscience software I am writing.
It is a fundamental problem of C++. Different compilers do not propagate exceptions the same way, and that's a problem when different compilers are involved (happens easily when the C and C++ compilers are not the same, for example). That has been a problem on every new platform I have tried to port numpy and scipy to.
Does this mean we cannot use g++ to compile extensions at all, when Python VM is compiled with MSVC? Or does the rule just apply to the particular extension, like C and Fortran runtimes?
I don't like the complexity of C++. But it has some advantages over C for scientific computing; notably STL containers, templates for generics, the std::complex<> type, and so on. The problem with C++ is that it encourages bloat ugly style, and OOP stuff is etter left in Python.
I personally like exceptions because they remove the need for lot or error checking. In C, we can achieve almost the same effect using setjmp/longjmp. Is that bad style as well?
The setjmp/longjmp machinery has been used (zeros.c, for instance), but I thinks it makes the C code less transparent and should be avoided unless the traditional use of return values is so ugly you can't bear to look at the code. C really doesn't have very good error handling, that may even be a feature in a low level language. It might be useful to think up some way that setjmp/longjmp could be used in some sort of standard error handling template. Chuck