29929.Improvement

For f2py, the behaviour of intent(inplace) has improved. Previously, if an input array did not have the right dtype or order, the input array was modified in-place, changing its dtype and replacing its data by a corrected copy. Now, instead, the corrected copy is kept a separate array, which, after being passed and presumably modified by the fortran routine, is copied back to the input routine. The above means one no longer has the risk that pre-existing views or slices of the input array start pointing to unallocated memory (at the price of increased overhead for the write-back copy at the end of the call).

A potential problem would be that one might get very different results if one, e.g., previously passed in an integer array where a double array was expected: the writeback to integer would likely give wrong results. To avoid such situations, intent(inplace) will now only allow arrays that have equivalent type to that used in the fortran routine, i.e., dtype.kind is the same. For instance, a routine expecting double would be able to receive float, but would raise on integer input.