On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 2:52 PM, Nathaniel Smith <n...@pobox.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 22, 2015 at 10:21 AM, Aldcroft, Thomas > <aldcr...@head.cfa.harvard.edu> wrote: > > The idea of a one-byte string dtype has been extensively discussed twice > > before, with a lot of good input and ideas, but no action [1, 2]. > > > > tl;dr: Perfect is the enemy of good. Can numpy just add a one-byte > string > > dtype named 's' that uses latin-1 encoding as a bridge to enable Python 3 > > usage in the near term? > > I think this is a good idea. I think overall it would be good for > numpy to switch to using variable-length strings in most cases (cf. > pandas), which is a different kind of change, but fixed-length 8-bit > encoded text is obviously a common on-disk format in scientific > applications, so numpy will still need some way to deal with it > conveniently. In the long run we'd like to have more flexibility (e.g. > allowing choice of character encoding), but since this proposal is a > subset of that functionality, then it won't interfere with later > improvements. I can see an argument for utf8 over latin1, but it > really doesn't matter that much so whatever, blue and purple bikesheds > are both fine. > > The tricky bit here is "just" :-). Do you want to implement this? Do > you know someone who does? It's possible but will be somewhat > annoying, since to do it directly without refactoring how dtypes work > first then you'll have to add lots of copy-paste code to all the > different ufuncs. > I'm would be happy to have a go at this, with the caveat that someone who understands numpy would need to get me started with a minimal prototype. >From there I can do the "annoying" copy-paste for ufuncs etc, writing tests and docs. I'm assuming that with a prototype then the rest can be done without any deep understanding of numpy internals (which I do not have). - Tom > > -n > > -- > Nathaniel J. Smith -- http://vorpus.org > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org > http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion >
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