[Numpy-discussion] np.{bool,float,int} deprecation

[Charles R Harris]

On Sat, Dec 5, 2020 at 4:31 PM Juan Nunez-Iglesias <jni at fastmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> At the prodding [1] of Sebastian, I’m starting a discussion on the
> decision to deprecate np.{bool,float,int}. This deprecation broke our
> prerelease testing in scikit-image (which, hooray for rcs!), and resulted
> in a large amount of code churn to fix [2].
>
> To be honest, I do think *some* sort of deprecation is needed, because for
> the longest time I thought that np.float was what np.float_ actually is. I
> think it would be worthwhile to move to *that*, though it’s an even more
> invasive deprecation than the currently proposed one. Writing `x =
> np.zeros(5, dtype=int)` is somewhat magical, because someone with a strict
> typing mindset (there’s an increasing number!) might expect that this is an
> array of pointers to Python ints. This is why I’ve always preferred to
> write `dtype=np.int`, resulting in the current code churn.
>
> I don’t know what the best answer is, just sparking the discussion
> Sebastian wants to see. ;) For skimage we’ve already merged a fix (even if
> it is one of dubious quality, as Stéfan points out [3] ;), so I don’t have
> too much stake in the outcome.
>
> Juan.
>
> [1]:
> https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image/pull/5103#issuecomment-739334463
> [2]: https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image/pull/5103
> [3]:
> https://github.com/scikit-image/scikit-image/pull/5103#issuecomment-739368765
>

I checked pandas and astropy and both have several uses of the deprecated
types but should be easy to fix. I suppose the question is if we want to
make them fix things *right now* :)

Chuck
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