On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 5:00 PM, Travis Oliphant <tra...@continuum.io>wrote:

> Hmmm.   This seems like a regression.  The scalar casting API was fairly
> intentional.
>
> What is the reason for the change?
>

In order to make 1.6 ABI-compatible with 1.5, I basically had to rewrite
this subsystem. There were virtually no tests in the test suite specifying
what the expected behavior should be, and there were clear inconsistencies
where for example "a+b" could result in a different type than "b+a". I
recall there being some bugs in the tracker related to this as well, but I
don't remember those details.

This change felt like an obvious extension of an existing behavior for
eliminating overflow, where the promotion changed unsigned -> signed based
on the value of the scalar. This change introduced minimal upcasting only
in a set of cases where an overflow was guaranteed to happen without that
upcasting.

During the 1.6 beta period, I signaled that this subsystem had changed, as
the bullet point starting "The ufunc uses a more consistent algorithm for
loop selection.":

http://mail.scipy.org/pipermail/numpy-discussion/2011-March/055156.html

The behavior Matthew has observed is a direct result of how I designed the
minimization function mentioned in that bullet point, and the algorithm for
it is documented in the 'Notes' section of the result_type page:

http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.result_type.html

Hopefully that explains it well enough. I made the change intentionally and
carefully, tested its impact on SciPy and other projects, and advocated for
it during the release cycle.

Cheers,
Mark

--
> Travis Oliphant
> (on a mobile)
> 512-826-7480
>
>
> On Feb 13, 2012, at 6:25 PM, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Hi,
> >
> > I recently noticed a change in the upcasting rules in numpy 1.6.0 /
> > 1.6.1 and I just wanted to check it was intentional.
> >
> > For all versions of numpy I've tested, we have:
> >
> >>>> import numpy as np
> >>>> Adata = np.array([127], dtype=np.int8)
> >>>> Bdata = np.int16(127)
> >>>> (Adata + Bdata).dtype
> > dtype('int8')
> >
> > That is - adding an integer scalar of a larger dtype does not result
> > in upcasting of the output dtype, if the data in the scalar type fits
> > in the smaller.
> >
> > For numpy < 1.6.0 we have this:
> >
> >>>> Bdata = np.int16(128)
> >>>> (Adata + Bdata).dtype
> > dtype('int8')
> >
> > That is - even if the data in the scalar does not fit in the dtype of
> > the array to which it is being added, there is no upcasting.
> >
> > For numpy >= 1.6.0 we have this:
> >
> >>>> Bdata = np.int16(128)
> >>>> (Adata + Bdata).dtype
> > dtype('int16')
> >
> > There is upcasting...
> >
> > I can see why the numpy 1.6.0 way might be preferable but it is an API
> > change I suppose.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Matthew
> > _______________________________________________
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> > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org
> > http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
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