On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 3:56 PM, Jonathan T. Niehof <jnie...@lanl.gov> wrote: > On 05/23/2012 05:31 PM, T J wrote: > >> It seems that there are a number of ways to check if an array is a view. >> Do we have a preferred way in the API that is guaranteed to stay >> available? Or are all of the various methods "here to stay"? > > We've settled on checking array.base, which I think was the outcome of a > stackoverflow thread that I can't dig up. (I'll check with the guy who > wrote the code.)
The problem is that "is a view" isn't a very meaningful concept... checking .base will tell you whether writes to an array are likely to affect some object that existed before that array was created. But it doesn't tell you whether writes to that array can affect any *particular* other object (at least without a fair amount of groveling around the innards of both objects), and it can happen that an object has base == None yet writes to it will affect another object, and it can happen that an object has base != None and yet writes to it won't affect any object that was ever accessible to your code. AFAICT it's really these other questions that one would like to answer, and checking .base won't answer them. -- Nathaniel _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
