Hi, I've seen the description of NumPy in the recent announcement (btw, good work!) and I think it misses something important. To put this in context, let me paste the description used for the latest announce:
""" NumPy is a Python extension that provides a multi-dimensional array and basic mathematical processing to Python. NumPy also provides foundation for basic image and signal processing, linear algebra and Fourier transforms, and random number generation. NumPy also includes easy integration with ctypes and Fortran allowing powerful extensions to be written. """ This is ok but I think it stresses a bit too much the mathematical side of NumPy and doesn't mention the important field of application for the flexible multi-dimensional data containers that it provides. Namely, these containers does offer support for completely general datatypes (not only numerical types, but also ascii strings and unicode strings) that can be combined in a general way (even forming heterogeneous and/or nested datatypes) in one single container in a very efficient manner (both in terms of speed and memory). I think that mentioning this concept can bring the attention of more people, and most specially, the developers of database wrappers. One should not forget that one of the limitations of the database interfaces in Python is that each element retrieved from the database has to be wrapped with a Python container (normally string or int/float objects), and this is very ineficient when you have to retrieve large datasets from databases. IMHO, database developers should learn about this capability of NumPy for the sake of achieving efficient databases interfaces for Python. Cheers, -- >0,0< Francesc Altet http://www.carabos.com/ V V Cárabos Coop. V. Enjoy Data "-" _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
