[Numpy-discussion] dtype attribute missing in numarray

[Todd Miller]

Sebastian Haase wrote:

>Thanks Todd,
>I like this a lot.  Maybe it could be mentioned in the documention - I don't 
>have any good suggestions on where, I just noticed that 'dtype' is not in the 
>index.
>I assume the following assignment to 'dtype' is not that important !?
>  
>
>>>>na.__version__
>>>>        
>>>>
>'1.5.1'
>  
>
>>>>a = na.arange(10,dtype=na.float32)
>>>>a.dtype
>>>>        
>>>>
>Float32
>  
>
>>>>a.dtype = na.int32
>>>>        
>>>>
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<input>", line 1, in ?
>AttributeError: can't set attribute
>  
>
Things are changing fast but I don't think this is supposed to work:

>>> import scipy

>>> a = scipy.arange(10)

>>> a

array([0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9])

>>> a.dtype

<type 'int32_arrtype'>

>>> a.dtype = scipy.int16

Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?

TypeError: attribute 'dtype' of 'scipy.bigndarray' objects is not writable

My thinking was that you'd need a.astype() which returns a new array 
object.  Since types vary in size,  it's not clear what it means to 
assign type or how it would affect shape.

>Also: when / why was it decided that dtypes (float32, int32, ...) should be 
>lowercase !? Aren't all python types usually uppercase ...
>  
>
The naming looks clean to me.    I don't know how the decision was made.