I'd like some advice for what way people feel would be the best for
supporting complex datatypes in NumPy in Cython; as well as ask in what
way it is likely that NumPy will make use of PEP 3118.
It seems like NumPy defines its complex data to be a struct of two
doubles, for instance:
typedef struct { double real, imag; } npy_cdouble;
According to PEP 3118 [1], it would be natural to export this as "dd"
(record of two doubles) rather than "Zd" (complex double), when
exporting ndarrays through a buffer interface. Right?
I'm implementing native Cython support/syntax candy for PEP 3118 [2] and
at the same time a backwards-compatability wrapper so that Cython can
access NumPy through PEP 3118 for Python <= 2.5 (essentially I implement
PyObject_GetBuffer etc. on behalf of NumPy for Python <= 2.5). Then the
question arise about how to deal with complex datatypes.
For Cython, it seems most user-friendly to use the C99 standard for
complex numbers (not currently supported, but it wouldn't be much work)
and have code like this:
cdef ndarray[complex double, 2] arr = ...
cdef complex double item
item = arr[34, 23]
So the natural questions then are:
- Is it ok to assume that (complex double*) can be safely casted to
(npy_cdouble*) on all platforms which both a) NumPy compiles and runs
on, and b) supports complex double? (It seems to be ok with GCC but I
wouldn't know about other compilers.)
- Will NumPy ever be rewritten to use the C99 complex datatype if
available? (I.e. #ifdef how npy_cdouble is defined, and define
corresponding #ifdef-ed macros for all complex operations). This would
remove the need for such a cast.
- Does NumPy plan to support PEP3118, and if so, will complex numbers be
exported as "dd" or "Zd"?
-
[1]: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-3118/
[2]: http://wiki.cython.org/enhancements/buffer
--
Dag Sverre
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