[Numpy-discussion] switching to float32

[Dan Goodman]

Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:
> Well, such a mechanism would mean that your code could not be reused 
> reliably by other code (because, what if two different codebases sets 
> different defaults...). So requiring any such mechanism would make it 
> easier to write non-reusable code, which is generally considered a bad 
> thing...
> 
> Note that it is relatively easy for you to do e.g.
> 
> default_dtype = np.float32
> 
> def array(*args, **kw):
>      if 'dtype' not in kw.keys():
>          return np.array(*args, **kw, dtype=default_dtype)
>      else:
>          return np.array(*args, **kw)
> 
> and so on in your own codebase, avoiding the problem.
> 

Neat trick - I think I'll do exactly that. I'll also need to cover a few 
other cases, like zeros(), ones(), etc., but I think it should work. One 
could even write a little macro that generates wrappers like this for 
all numpy/scipy functions that have a 'dtype' argument.

Thanks for an excellent idea!

Dan