On Mon, Aug 23, 2010 at 9:20 AM, Travis Oliphant <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Aug 22, 2010, at 4:36 PM, Nathaniel Smith wrote:
>> Question 2: Am I missing something, or does the ufunc API make this
>> impossible? The problem is that a "PyUFuncGenericFunction" doesn't
>> have any way to find the dtypes of the arrays that it's working on.
>> All of the PyArray_ArrFuncs functions take a pointer to the underlying
>> ndarray as an argument, so that when working with a string or void
>> array, you can find the actual dtype and figure out (e.g.) the size of
>> the objects involved. But ufunc inner loops don't get that, so I guess
>> it's just impossible to define a ufunc over variable-sized data, or
>> data that you need to be able to see the dtype metadata to interpret?
>
> Yes, currently that is correct.   Variable data-types don't work in ufuncs 
> for some subtle reasons.  But, the changes that allow date-times to work also 
> fix (or will fix) this problem as a side-effect.
>
> The necessary changes to ufuncs have not been made, yet, however.   They are 
> planned.   And, yes, this would allow ufuncs to be used for string equality 
> testing, etc.

Okay, thanks. It sounds like I'll need to accomplish what I want in
some other way for now, then, but if I get some surplus time somehow
then maybe I'll take a crack at the "proper" solution :-).

-- Nathaniel
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