Re: Fwd: Re: [pygame] SDL-ctypes progress

[Alex Holkner <aholkner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Peter Shinners wrote:

> Forwarded message from Mike Fletcher:
> ---------------------------------------------------------
>  
>
> > I'm wondering if we can just always have SDL functions return new
> > "ctypes" style arrays. Then provide convenience functions for wrapping
> > those into array types for other libraries.
> >    pal = mysurf.format.palette
> >    palette = SDL.numpy.Convert(pal.ncolors, pal, colors)
> >
> > Then again, we may prefer more specific array building functions.
> >    palette_array = SDL.numeric.PaletteArray(mysurf.format.palette)
> >    pixel_array = SDL.numeric.PixelsArray(mysurf)
> >  
> >    
>
> I'd considered this, but it winds up *requiring* that code be written
> explicitly for the ctypes version of the library, which I'd defined (for
> my project, SDL-ctypes) as not being allowable (since if you've written
> the code for Numeric + PyOpenGL you always expect to get back
> Numeric-array-compatible objects).
>
> Sorry for the delay in responding to this,
> Mike
>  
I think I've missed some of this thread.  Mike, you also have a 
SDL-ctypes project?

For (my) SDL-ctypes, there are no compatibility issues: there is no 
other SDL wrapper for Python (PySDL being abandoned).

The way the current API works, if a user wants a numpy array:

 pixel_array = mysurf.pixels.as_numpy()

Yes, this requires that all users need numpy installed, but then, that's 
probably because the program is going to be using numpy functions 
anyway.  Numpy/numeric/numarray, while similar, are by no means 
identical or interchangeable.

Alex.