On Dec 7, 2009, at 12:17 PM, Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:
> I'm growing worried here. Will there be three levels of inference
> (none,
> safe, full) exposed to end-users?
>
> That's way too complicated in my opinion. The point of "safe"
> inference
> is that they can be done by default, without users having to know
> anything about it (except that some more code just run faster). If you
> have to actually read the manual to understand it and turn it on, you
> might as well use the full mode.
For debugging purposes, it might be good to make it easy to turn it
completely off, especially since it's such a new feature. I do have to
say I'm not a fan of the current interface. What I think would be more
useful is
cython.infer_types(True) # explicitly enable it everywhere.
cython.infer_types(False) # explicitly disable it everywere,
including "safe" inference.
cython.infer_types(None) # the default, "safe" inference. What
this actually means may change over time, but the semantics of the
resulting code shouldn't.
This is similar to the dilemma with Profiling, where the default
should probably be sometimes enabled (e.g. for def functions, not for
inline functions) and a boolean value is an easy to remember explicit
flag one can pass.
> I'm not against "bint" always being 0 or 1 in general though, so that
>
> cdef bint x = 3
>
> turns into
>
> cdef bint x = (3 != 0)
>
> and
>
> cdef extern bint foo()
> x = foo()
>
> turns into
>
> __pyx_v_x = (foo() != 0);
This may have performance ramifications...though probably small. Also,
we can't make any guarantees (without extra work) about extern
functions that are declared to return bint (which are not as uncommon
as one would think...)
> But, it should be completely orthogonal to type inference!
Yep.
- Robert
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