recarray.__setattr__ bug?

[Michael McNeil Forbes]

In article <200610281530.22929.pgmdevlist at gmail.com>,
 Pierre GM <pgmdevlist at gmail.com> wrote:
> So that I could have a field named 'shape', and modifying 
> r.shape would change the shape of the array, not the content of the field ?
> 
> That makes sense, but isn't it a bit dangerous ? Shouldn't we have a list of 
> reserved keywords (dtype, shape...) that would raise an exception if used as 
> field names ?

Since the field names can be used with regular arrays without any 
consequences, I think it would be bad to raise an exception with 
recarrays where there was no problem with regular arrays, and regular 
arrays should allow field names such as 'shape'.

A note should be added to the recarray documentation, however, pointing 
out this pitfall.  Perhaps a warning could be raised when a recarray is 
constructed with poor fieldname choices, but I would not raise an 
exception.

In any case, I think is is dangerous to allow the fieldnames to hide 
standard array members.  This would break the array interface for such 
recarrays causing many subtle problems for any algorithm that assumed 
the recarray to behave as a standard array: This code could be deeply 
buried.

Instead, the user's code would behave 'strangely', but it is also the 
user's code that assigned bad fieldnames, and a warning would alert of 
this.

Another concern that I found with the recarray interface is that the 
current implementation exhibits quite poor performance, but I am not 
sure how to fix this yet.

Is there any documentation about the general design decisions behind 
recarrays?  I think they could be very useful for simplifying code, but 
could use several improvements.

Michael.


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