Daniel Arbuckle's Mastering Python

Writing extension modules in Cython

The num_values variable in the previous code example is just a chunk of memory that stores bits that represent an integer value. It doesn't have any of the extra data needed to turn it into a Python object.

This is a bad thing in a way because it means that Python can't do any of the smart things it does to help us write good code quickly.We wouldn't be working with these tools if we didn't have a reason to let them do some of this work for us.

So, to resolve this, let's define an extension type called StatisticalArray (refer to the following code example), which contains a pointer to a memory location and two integers. The memory location is supposed to contain double-precision floating point numbers. ...