> > You might be right, Chuck. I would like to investigate more, however. > > What I fear is that there are *a lot* of users still on NumPy 1.3 and NumPy > 1.5. The fact that we haven't heard any complaints, yet, does not mean to > me that we aren't creating headache for people later who have just not had > time to try things. > > However, I can believe that the specifics of "minor" casting rules are > probably not relied upon by a lot of codes out there. Still, as Robert Kern > often reminds us well --- our intuitions about this are usually not worth > much. > > I may be making more of this then it's worth, I realize. I was just > sensitive to it at the time things were changing (even though I didn't have > time to be vocal), and now hearing this users experience, it confirms my > bias... Believe me, I do not want to "revert" if at all possible. There > is plenty of more work to do, and I'm very much in favor of the spirit of the > work Mark was and is doing. > > > I think writing tests would be more productive. The current coverage is > skimpy in that we typically don't cover *all* the combinations. Sometimes we > don't cover any of them ;) I know you are sensitive to the typecasting, it > was one of your babies. Nevertheless, I don't think it is that big an issue > at the moment. If you can think of ways to *improve* it I think everyone will > be interested in that.
First of all, I would hardly call it one of my babies. I care far more for my actual babies than for this. It was certainly one of my headaches that I had to deal with and write code for (and take into account previous behavior with). I certainly spent a lot of time wrestling with type-coercion and integrating numerous opinions as quickly as I could with it --- even in Numeric with the funny down_casting arrays. At best the resulting system was a compromise (with an implementation that you could reason about with the right perspective despite claims to the contrary). This discussion is not about me being sensitive because I wrote some code or had a hand in a design that needed changing. I hope we replace all the code I've written with something better. I expect that eventually. This just has to be done in an appropriate way. I'm sensitive because I understand where the previous code came from and *why it was written* and am concerned about changing things out from under users in ways that are subtle. I continue to affirm that breaking ABI compatibility is much preferable to changing type-casting behavior. I know people disagree with me. But, distributions help solve the "ABI compatibility problem", but nothing solves required code changes due to subtle type-casting issues. I would just expect this sort of change at NumPy 2.0. We could have waited for half-float until then. I will send the result of my analysis shortly on what changed between 1.5.1 and 1.6.1 -Travis
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