[Numpy-discussion] Setting custom dtypes and 1.14

[Chris Barker]

On Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 7:44 PM, Allan Haldane <allanhaldane at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I suggest that if we want to allow either means over fields, or conversion
> of a n-D structured array to an n+1-D regular ndarray, we should add a
> dedicated function to do so in numpy.lib.recfunctions
> which does not depend on the binary representation of the array.
>

IIUC, the core use-case of structured dtypes is binary compatibility with
external systems (arrays of C structs, mostly) -- at least that's how I use
them :-)

In which case, "conversion of a n-D structured array to an n+1-D regular
ndarray" is an important feature -- actually even more important if you
don't use recarrays

So yes, let's have a utility to make that easy.

as for recarrays -- are we that far from having them be robust and useful?
in which case, why not keep them around, fix the few issues, but explicitly
not try to extend them into more dataframe-like domains

-CHB

-- 

Christopher Barker, Ph.D.
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