[Numpy-discussion] size_t or npy_intp?

[Francesc Alted]

A Tuesday 27 July 2010 15:20:47 Charles R Harris escrigué:
> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 7:08 AM, Francesc Alted <faltet at pytables.org> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > I'm a bit confused on which datatype should I use when referring to NumPy
> > ndarray lengths.  In one hand I'd use `size_t` that is the canonical way
> > to refer to lengths of memory blocks.  In the other hand, `npy_intp`
> > seems the standard data type used in NumPy for this.
> 
> They have different ranges, npy_intp is signed and in later versions of
> Python is the same as Py_ssize_t, while size_t is unsigned. It would be a
> bad idea to mix the two.

Agreed that mixing the two is a bad idea.  So I suppose that you are 
suggesting to use `npy_intp`.  But then, I'd say that `size_t` being unsigned, 
is a better fit for describing a memory length.

Mmh, I'll stick with `size_t` for the time being (unless anyone else can 
convince me that this is really a big mistake ;-)

-- 
Francesc Alted