On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 10:21 AM, Robert Kern <robert.kern@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 8:45 PM, Chris Barker - NOAA Federal <chris.barker@noaa.gov> wrote:
Given that numpy scalars do exist, and have their uses -- I found this wiki page to remind me:
http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/wiki/ZeroRankArray
It would be nice if the .npy format could support them. Would that be a major change? I'm trying to decide if this bugs me enough to work on that.
I think that is significant scope creep for the .npy format, and I would like to avoid it.
hmm -- maybe it's more work that we want, but it seems to me that numpy scalars are part and parcel of numpy -- so it makes sense for .npy to save them.
A case might be made for letting np.savez() simply pickle non-arrays that it is given. I have a vague recollection that that was discussed when savez() was designed and rejected as a moral hazard, but I could be wrong.
That could be a nice solution -- I'm not _so_ worried about moral hazards!
The .npy and .npz formats are intentionally limited by design. As soon as you feel constrained by those limitations, you should start using more full-fledged and standard file formats.
well, maybe -- in this case, I'm using it to cache a bunch of data on disk. The data are all in a dict of numpy arrays, so it was really natural and easy (and I presume fast) to use npz. All I want to is dump it to disk, and get back the same way. It worked great. Then I needed a datetime stored with it all -- so I figured a datetime64 scalar would be perfect. It's not a huge deal to use a rank-zero array instead, but it would have been nicer to be able to store a scalar (I suppose one trick may be that there are numpy scalars, and there are regular old pyton scalars...) Anyway -- going to HDF, or netcdf, or role-your-own really seems like overkill for this. I just need something fast and simple and it doesn't need to interchange with anything else. -Chris -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception Chris.Barker@noaa.gov