On Mon, Jun 30, 2014 at 3:47 PM, Derek Homeier <derek@astro.physik.uni-goettingen.de> wrote:
Does it make sense to keep maintaing both functions at all? IIRC the idea that loadtxt would be the faster version of the two has been discarded long ago, thus it seems there is very little, if anything, loadtxt can do that cannot be done just as well by genfromtxt. Main compatibility issue is probably different default behaviour and interface of the two, but perhaps that might be best solved by replacing loadtxt with another genfromtxt wrapper? A real need, which had also been discussed at length, is a truly performant text IO function (i.e. one using a compiled ASCII number parser, and optimally also a more memory-efficient one), but unfortunately all people interested in implementing this seem to have drifted away (not excluding myself from this)…
It's possible we could steal some code from Pandas for this. IIRC they have C/Cython text parsing routines. (It's also an interesting question whether they've fixed the unicode/binary issues, might be worth checking before rewriting from scratch...) -- Nathaniel J. Smith Postdoctoral researcher - Informatics - University of Edinburgh http://vorpus.org