Why do polygons have dtype('O') rather than something numeric?

[gdmcbain]

When using gds_read, I found that the polygons are represented as numpy.ndarray of dtype('O'), i.e. object, not, say float or 'float64'.

For feeding the polygons to programs downstream, sometimes this matters, sometimes not. For example matplotlib and FreeCAD recognize the coordinates as numbers but PyGmsh doesn't.

To demonstrate, take any gds, say tutorial.gds from here, and

gds = GdsLibrary()
gds.read_gds(argv[1])

for layer, v in gds.top_level()[0].get_polygons(True).iteritems():
    print(layer, map(lambda p: (p.shape, p.dtype), v))

The workaround is trivial of course, just p.astype(float) (as in Polygon.fillet) or np.asarray(p, dtype=float) if a function is preferred to a method, but I was curious as to why the coordinates weren't numeric in the first place.

[heitzmann]

Thanks for the issue. This bug was introduced when the source was changed from python 2 to 3 and affected only python 2.*. Should be fixed now.