Re: [Numpy-discussion] recarray field names

[Fernando P. <Fer...@co...>]

Travis Oliphant wrote:

> The dtype object does contain what you want.  In fact.  It's the fields 
> attribute of the dtype object that is a dictionary accessed by field 
> name.  Thus, to see if a field is a valid field itdentifier,
> 
> if name in t.dtype.fields:
> 
> would work  (well there is a slight problem in that -1 is a special key 
> to the dictionary that returns a list of field names ordered by offset 
> and so would work also), but if you now that name is already a string, 
> then no problem.

Mmh, just curious: I wonder about the wisdom of that overloading of a 'magic' 
key (-1).  It will make thinks like

for name in t.dtype.fields:


return a spurious entry (the -1),  and having the sorted list accessed as

for name in t.dtype.fields[-1]:

reads weird.  I'm sure there was a good reason behind this, but I wonder if it 
wouldn't be better to provide this particular functionality (the list 
currently associated with the special -1 key) via a different mechanism, and 
guaranteeing that t.dtype.fields.keys() == [ list of valid names ].

It just sounds like enforcing a bit of API orthogonality here would be a good 
thing in the long run, but perhaps I'm missing something (I don't claim to 
know the reasoning that went behind today's implementation).

Best,

f