On Mon, 16 Sep 2002, Travis Oliphant wrote:

>  > Frankly, I have no idea what the implimentation details would be, but
>  > could we get rid of rank-0 arrays altogether? I have always simply found
>  > them strange and confusing... What are they really neccesary for
>  > (besides holding scalar values of different precision that standard
>  > Pyton scalars)?
>  
>  With new coercion rules this becomes a possibility.  Arguments against it
>  are that special rank-0 arrays behave as more consistent numbers with the
>  rest of Numeric than Python scalars.  In other words they have a length
>  and a shape and one can right N-dimensional code that works the same even
>  when the result is a scalar.

In addition, rank-0 arrays are mutable while Python scalars are not.
Mutability is sometimes useful (e.g. when emulating C or Fortran
calls in Python) but often also evil due to its unpythonic side effect.

Pearu



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