On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 4:31 PM, David Warde-Farley<[email protected]> wrote: > A question was raised on the #scipy IRC earlier today, about the > behaviour of array() with structured dtypes. After some educated > guessing I figured out that for record arrays, tuples (rather than > lists) must be used to indicate atomic elements. What I wondered is > whether this behaviour is documented anywhere, and does it belong in > the array() docstring, for example? The docstring currently reads "... > or any (nested) sequence."
+1 for a clear indication of this fact, as it's rather unusual that a tuple is OK where a list is not (for typical pythyon APIs) and the error is *very* obscure. I've been bitten enough times by this that by now I'm used to it, but I distinctly remember much head scratching and looking in the wrong places the first time I was hit by this behavior. I don't know if there's a good reason why lists aren't accepted though, so that instead of documenting an oddity it could just be cleaned up. Is it not possible for the constructor to duck-type here a list for a tuple? Maybe there's a good reason, but it feels like a bit of a wart. In any case, whether fixing or documenting it, +1 from this side. Cheers, f _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
