[SciPy-dev] [Numpy-discussion] Thoughts on making it easier for numarray users to transition to scipy_core

[Perry Greenfield]

On Dec 12, 2005, at 3:48 PM, Travis Oliphant wrote:

>
> A few days ago I played with nd_image and was able to make it compile 
> for scipy_core.  In the process, I had some ideas for making the 
> transition to scipy_core easier for numarray users:
>
> 1) It would be nice if there was someway to document on the Python 
> level any needed changes.  In the process, we might find things that 
> need to be added to scipy_core.  I would like to have some kind of 
> program for automatically making most of those needed changes before a 
> 1.0 release of scipy_core.
>
> 2) On the C-API side, my experience with nd_image showed me that quite 
> a few of the numarray C-API calls can be written as macros while some 
> will need to be additional functions.  I think we could easily write a 
> numcompatmodule.c and associated numcompat.h file so that users 
> needing the numarray C-API could include the numcompat.h file and then 
> the import_libnumarray() command would load the numcompatmodule.c with 
> it's compatibility functions.
>
> In this way, the transition for C-API users could be as easy as 
> changing the include file to numcompat.h?
> -Travis
>
That certainly would be nice. We are starting to look migrating some 
Python code. It may be a little while
(a couple months?) before we can start tackling migrating some of the C 
extension code so we won't be exercising that right away (but maybe 
someone else can).

Perry