On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 5:52 PM Wes McKinney <wesmck...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 10:49 AM Krisztián Szűcs
> <szucs.kriszt...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > From the user perspective I find the following pretty confusing:
> >
> > In [1]: np.array([-128, 127], dtype=np.int8()) * 2
> > Out[1]: array([ 0, -2], dtype=int8)
> >
> > In [2]: np.array([-128, 127], dtype=np.int16()) * 2
> > Out[2]: array([-256,  254], dtype=int16)
> >
> > In my opinion somewhere (on a higher level maybe) we should provide
> > the correct results promoted to a wider type implicitly.
>
> Yes, I agree with you, but I agree that the best place to address this
> is at a higher level rather than having this logic implemented at the
> lowest level (kernels) -- I think database systems handle this during
> logical->physical planning.

It raises another question: where to incorporate the implicit promotions?
// correct me if I'm wrong but these implicit promotions are operation
// dependent and distinct from kernel dispatching issue [1]

The numpy example above can be roughly translated to:
>>> a = pa.array([-128, 127])
>>> pa.compute.add(a, a)
array([ 0, -2]

Which is rather surprising from the user's perspective.

[1] https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/ARROW-8919
>
> > Clickhouse for example does the type promotion.
> >
> > On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 5:29 PM Antoine Pitrou <solip...@pitrou.net> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Wed, 3 Jun 2020 10:47:38 -0400
> > > Ben Kietzman <ben.kietz...@rstudio.com> wrote:
> > > > https://github.com/apache/arrow/pull/7341#issuecomment-638241193
> > > >
> > > > How should arithmetic kernels handle integer overflow?
> > > >
> > > > The approach currently taken in the linked PR is to promote such that
> > > > overflow will not occur, for example `(int8, int8)->int16` and `(uint16,
> > > > uint16)->uint32`.
> > > >
> > > > I'm not sure that's desirable. For one thing this leads to inconsistent
> > > > handling of 64 bit integer types, which are currently allowed to 
> > > > overflow
> > > > since we cannot promote further (NB: that means this kernel includes
> > > > undefined behavior for int64).
> > >
> > > I agree with you.  I would strongly advise against implicit promotion
> > > accross arithmetic operations.  We initially did that in Numba and it
> > > quickly became a can of worms.
> > >
> > > The most desirable behaviour IMHO is to keep the original type, so:
> > > - (int8, int8) -> int8
> > > - (uint16, uint16) -> uint16
> > >
> > > Then the question is what happens when the actual overflow occurs.  I
> > > think this should be directed by a kernel option.  By default an error
> > > should probably be raised (letting errors pass and silently produce
> > > erroneous data is wrong), but we might want to allow people to bypass
> > > overflow checks for speed.
> > >
> > > Note that even if overflow detection is enabled, it *should* be possible
> > > to enable vectorization, e.g. by making overflow detection a separate
> > > pass (itself vectorizable).
> > >
> > > Regards
> > >
> > > Antoine.
> > >
> > >

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