Re: [Numpy-discussion] Need more comments from scientific community on python-dev

[Bill B. <wb...@gm...>]

On 11/2/06, A. M. Archibald <per...@gm...> wrote:
>
> On 01/11/06, Travis Oliphant <oli...@ie...> wrote:
>
> > And it may be a good idea to also have a get_ctype method or some-such
> > on the ctypes attribute so that  one could get a "ctypes description"
> > from the NumPy data-type.
>
> It seems to me that at the python level, there's not much reason to
> choose the dtypes proposal over ctypes. There is one at the C level,
> it seems (though I, like perhaps most of the people on python-dev,
> have never actually tried using either). So perhaps, to persuade the
> python-dev folks, what is needed is a comparison of what has to be
> done at the C level. What would it take to rewrite numpy to use
> ctypes? There seems to be some problem with extending the type objects
> used by ctypes, but it's not very clear to me what that problem is
> (what the extensions are supposed to do).



I posted a message to the thread trying to prod things in that direction.
I.e. can we see a simple concrete example of the complications involved in
using ctypes interface code, vs the presumably much nicer
numpy/data-descriptor code.  I too think that would help convince people.
Just saying it's more compilcated, trust me, doesn't help when most people
reading the list have never had to write any sort of C extension.

--bb