[SciPy-dev] Changing return types in C API

[David M. Cooke]

One thing I like about numarray's "native" C API is that for  
functions that return arrays, the return type is PyArrayObject *, as  
opposed to the Numeric-compatible API, where the return types are  
PyObject *.
Returning PyObject * in this case basically means you're *always*  
doing a cast like this:

PyObject *o;
PyArrayObject *a;

a = (PyArrayObject *)PyArray_ContiguousFromObject(o, PyArray_DOUBLE,  
2, 2);

Could we change the API so that PyArrayObject * is used as the return  
type?

On a similar note: the 'data' member of PyArrayObject's is a char *,  
where it really should be a void *. Being a void pointer would have  
the advantage of not needing the cast in cases like this:

double *adata = (double)(a->data);

It would also mean that accidentally dereferencing the pointer would  
be a compiler error: currently, a->data[0] is valid, but if a->data  
was a void *, it wouldn't be.

Both of these changes wouldn't require recompiling extensions (since  
we're just relabelling what the pointer types are), and would be  
source-compatible with old code (since the casts used would now be  
superfluous). Newer code will also be easier to write.

I'll work on the changes in a svn branch if people think this is a  
good idea.

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|David M. Cooke              http://arbutus.physics.mcmaster.ca/dmc/
|cookedm at physics.mcmaster.ca