Re: [Numpy-discussion] Defining custom types

[Robert K. <rob...@gm...>]

Jonathan Wang wrote:

> It's just confusing as the documentation indicates that the setitem 
> function should return 0 for success and a negative number for failure. 
> But within Array_FromPyScalar, we have:
> 
>         ret->descr->f->setitem(op, ret->data, ret);
> 
>         if (PyErr_Occurred()) {
>                 Py_DECREF(ret);
>                 return NULL;
>         } else {
>                 return (PyObject *)ret;
>         }
> 
> So, someone reading the documentation could return -1 on failure without 
> setting the Python error flag, and the function would happily continue 
> on its way and fail to perform the proper casts.

That's a documentation vagueness, then. This is a convention established by the 
Python C API. If an error happens in a function that returns PyObject*, then it 
should return NULL to inform the caller that an error happened; other functions 
should return 0 for success and -1 for an error. However, the function must 
still set an exception object. The rest is just a convenient convention.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco