[pygame] Q about Numeric, ufuncs, output args

[Jeremy Biddle <biddle@bu.edu>]

This problem appears to be solved in numarray, but since we're stuck 
with Numeric for the time being I thought I would ask this here (I 
originally posted it to comp.lang.python) as well.

Has anyone used Numeric and figured out how to get around this?

----

hi, I haven't been able to resolve this problem, the docs were not
explicit enough and a search hasn't yielded a resolution so I'm
posting for some help.

I'm using Numeric to do some array calculations on Int8 arrays, but
the results of the logical comparison ufuncs return 32-bit ints and so
are incompatible with my data set. (btw, I'm using pygame so I can't
move to numarray -- not sure whether that would solve the problem
anyway...)

Here's an illustration of the problem --

>>> import Numeric as N
>>> a = N.zeros((5,5), N.Int8)
>>> N.equal(a,0,a)
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
TypeError: return array has incorrect type

I know I can do this:
>>> a = N.zeros((5,5), N.Int8)
>>> a = N.equal(a,0).astype(N.Int8)
...but I want to do an in-place operation (using output args) to save
time and space.

Is there any way to tell the ufunc to use Int8s instead of Int32s (or
64s or whatever)??

Thanks,
Jeremy