[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] type coercion one more time

[Perry A. Stoll]

>>>>> "JH" == James Hugunin <jjh@Goldilocks.LCS.MIT.EDU> writes:

    JH>    From: Guido van Rossum <guido@CNRI.Reston.VA.US>

    >> No automatic coercion will take place between these precisions.

    JH>    This surprises me (especially since C does support float ->
    JH> double coercions).  Would you care to explain it?

    JH> Naive users of the system are only expected to use arrays of
    JH> longs, doubles, and complex doubles.  I wanted to make sure
    JH> that all of the automatic coercion rules would work for these
    JH> most frequently used types so that they'll work just like the
    JH> corresponding python scalars.

    JH> On the other hand, I see the other types as being used for
    JH> cases where the programmer really wants to use a particular
    JH> precision, ie. 2-byte integers for dealing with 16-bit sound
    JH> data.  In a case like this it seems decidely unfriendly to
    JH> automatically coerce to another precision.

    JH> One can imagine dividing each sample in a sound by 2, and then
    JH> trying to play it back and hearing garbage because it got
    JH> automatically converted to an array of longs during the
    JH> division.


    JH> I do have one other possible set of rules that I would be
    JH> happy with.  These are basically the same as the last post,
    JH> except:

    JH> 4) Coercion to a higher precision is allowed within the main
    JH> groupings.

    JH> 5) The precision of a python scalar is allowed to change to
    JH> match the other arguments (3.14 can be either a float or a
    JH> double depending on which one is "desired").

    JH> Do people prefer this revised scheme?

So you try to coerce a scalar to the type of the matrix, using
the same idea as in 4)? Is the following right?

Array_SomeIntType   * AnyIntType     =  Array_SomeIntType
Array_SomeIntType   * SomeFloatType  =? Array_SomeFloatType
Array_SomeFloatType * AnyIntType     =? Array_SomeFloatType
Array_SomeFloatType * OtherFloatType =  Array_SomeFloatType

That seems pretty reasonable. Do the '=?' cases sound ok? It should
preserve coercions with the normal Python types. Users of specialized
C type multiarrays must exercise a bit of caution that they don't
cause overflow, but that isn't unreasonable.

-Perry





=================
MATRIX-SIG  - SIG on Matrix Math for Python

send messages to: matrix-sig@python.org
administrivia to: matrix-sig-request@python.org
=================