You are viewing a plain text version of this content. The canonical link for it is here.
Posted to user@arrow.apache.org by Daniel Nugent <nu...@gmail.com> on 2020/03/25 20:48:22 UTC
Why are dictionary indices signed?
Can’t find much in the way of reasoning in documentation for this. Closest is some issues about unsigned ints not being implemented a while back.
Has this become a deep dependency or is it still just an accident of implementation? It appears that only the unsigned indices are used.
-Dan Nugent
Re: Why are dictionary indices signed?
Posted by Wes McKinney <we...@gmail.com>.
It was a deliberate decision to use signed indices. The thought
process as I recall was that it was a more compatible choice to use
across programming languages. In theory both signed and unsigned
indices could be supported, but it becomes a question whether you want
to maintain 8 code paths for code that processes dictionary indices.
On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 3:48 PM Daniel Nugent <nu...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Can’t find much in the way of reasoning in documentation for this. Closest is some issues about unsigned ints not being implemented a while back.
>
> Has this become a deep dependency or is it still just an accident of implementation? It appears that only the unsigned indices are used.
>
> -Dan Nugent