[Numpy-discussion] array, asarray as contiguous and friends

[Travis Oliphant]

Tim Hochberg wrote:

>
> That makes some sense.
>
>>
>> The ndmin is very handy as atested to by the uses of atleast_1d or 
>> atleast_2d in numpy library code.   It was added later as an 
>> optimization step because of the number of library routines that were 
>> using it.  I've since used it several times to simplify code. 
>
>
> OK, I'll take your word for it.


Not necessarily sane advice :-)  --- I might be overstating things.  I 
know that atleast_1d and atleast_2d are used all over the place in scipy. 

This makes sense and I can certainly understand it.  I'm willing to 
modify things to give narrow interfaces.

Right now, since the requesting both fortran and contiguous does not 
make sense, setting the fortran flag to false enforces C-style 
contiguous while setting it to True enforces fortran-style.  Setting it 
to None (the default) specifies you don't care and the behavior will be 
to create C-style contiguous for new arrays and use the striding 
specified by the array if it's already an array.   I admit that it is 
arguable whether or not the fortran flag should be overloaded like this 
or not.

There are now ascontiguous and asfortran functions with fairly minimal 
interfaces to make it simpler.

There is also a check to make sure that array is called with no more 
than 2 non keyword arguments.  Thus, you won't be able to confuse which 
flag is which.


-Travis