[Python-Dev] PEP: Adding data-type objects to Python

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Travis E. Oliphant schrieb:
> I was too hasty.  There are some things actually missing from ctypes:

I think Thomas can correct me if I'm wrong: I think endianness is
supported (although this support seems undocumented). There seems
to be code that checks for the presence of a _byteswapped_ attribute
on fields of a struct; presence of this field is then interpreted
as data having the "other" endianness.

> 1) long double (this is not the same across platforms, but it is a 
> data-type).

That's indeed missing.

> 2) complex-valued types (you might argue that it's just a 2-array of 
> floats, but you could say the same thing about int as an array of 
> bytes).  The point is how do people interpret the data.  Complex-valued 
> data-types are very common.  It is one reason Fortran is still used by 
> scientists.

Well, by the same reasoning, you could argue that pixel values (RGBA)
are missing in the PEP. It's a convenience, sure, and it may also help
interfacing with the platform's FORTRAN implementation - however, are
you sure that NumPy's complex layout is consistent with the platform's
C99 _Complex definition?

> 3) Unicode characters
> 
> 4) What about floating-point representations that are not IEEE 754 
> 4-byte or 8-byte.

Both of these are available in a platform-dependent way: if the
platform uses non-IEEE754 formats for C float and C double, ctypes
will interface with that just fine. It is actually vice versa:
IEEE-754 4-byte and 8-byte is not supported in ctypes.
Same for Unicode: the platform's wchar_t is supported (as you said),
but not a platform-independent (say) 4-byte little-endian.

Regards,
Martin