[SciPy-dev] Introductions, sparse matrix support

[Jonathan Guyer]

On Oct 13, 2005, at 1:53 PM, Travis Oliphant wrote:

> I'd happily welcome those extension types, but let's see if we can't
> make them all subclasses of one base-class.   Look at how the scipy
> sparse Python classes are layed out.  Basically, by defining a tocsc 
> and
> fromcsc, all of them can be converted to each other and used as 
> solvers.

> I did put some effort into the structure of scipy.sparse.   I did not
> put any effort into optimizations, though.

I think this is important. PySparse is neither very object oriented nor 
very "Pythonic". I think the API can be done much better [*] (and 
scipy.sparse may be it; I haven't had time yet to do anything practical 
with it). I don't mean to denigrate PySparse; we happily use it and 
Roman has been very open to our suggestions, I just think that we can 
learn from it and do better.

[*] for that matter, the C code's not very pretty, either, but that's 
less important to me than the design of the Python API.

-- 
Jonathan E. Guyer, PhD
Metallurgy Division
National Institute of Standards and Technology
<http://www.metallurgy.nist.gov/>