[Numpy-discussion] Re: Numpy-discussion digest, Vol 1 #152 - 2 msgs

[Paul Barrett]

Travis Oliphant writes:

[snip snip]

 > > 
 > > I have therefore come to the conclusion that we have been barking up the
 > > wrong tree. There might be a few cases where inheritance would buy you
 > > something, but essentially Numeric and MA are useless as parents. Instead,
 > > what would be good to have is a python class Numeric built upon a suite of C
 > > routines that did all the real work, such as adding, transposing, iterating
 > > over elements, applying a function to each element, etc. 
 > 
 > I think this is what I've been trying to do in the "rewrite."  Paul
 > Barrett has made some excellent progress here.

I am currently writing the PEP 209: Multidimensional Arrays
documentation and hope to submit the initial draft by the end of the
week for comments.  The proposed design is along the lines Paul Dubois
has suggested.

 > > Since it is now
 > > possible to build a Python class with C methods, which it was not when
 > > Numeric was created, we ought to think about it. 
 > 
 > What does this mean?  What feature gives this ability?  I'm not sure I see
 > when this changed?

I'd also like to know what Paul Dubois means by this.

 > > Such an API could be used
 > > to make other classes with good performance. We could lose the artificial
 > > layer that is in there now that makes it so tedious to add a function. (I
 > > counted something like five or six places I had to modify when I added
 > > "put".)
 > 
 > I'd love to talk more with you about this.

Ditto!

-- 
Dr. Paul Barrett       Space Telescope Science Institute
Phone: 410-338-4475    ESS/Science Software Group
FAX:   410-338-4767    Baltimore, MD 21218