Dag Sverre Seljebotn wrote:
The argument to the above goes that you *should* be out of luck. For instance, talking about dot products, BLAS itself has float-float and double-double, but not float-double AFAIK.
Seems to me that's more because generating lots of versions of a function in C is hard work, and the designers of BLAS didn't think it was worth providing more than two versions. If they'd had a tool that would magically generate all the combinations for them, they might have made a different choice. What you seem to be trying to do here is enable compile-time duck typing, so that you can write a function that "just works" with a variety of argument types, without having to think about the details. With that mindset, seeing a function declared as cdef func(floating x, floating y) one would expect that x and y could be independently chosen as any of the types classified as "floating", because that's the way duck typing usually works. For example, if a Python function is documented as taking two sequences, you expect that to mean *any* two sequences, not two sequences of the same type.
What you are saying that this does not have the full power of C++ templates. And the answer is that yes, this does not have the full power of C++ templates.
What I'm suggesting doesn't have the full power of C++ templates either, because the range of possible values for each type parameter would still have to be specified in advance. However, it makes the dependencies between the type parameters explicit, rather than being hidden in some rather unintuitive implicit rules.
Would it be feasible to have a Skype session sometimes this week where everybody interested in the outcome of this come together for an hour and actually decide on something?
I'm not sure that would help much. Reaching good decisions about things like this requires time to think through all the issues. -- Greg _______________________________________________ cython-devel mailing list cython-devel@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/cython-devel
