Fernando Perez wrote:
- Is there anything in Numarray's design which prevents this same trick from
being used?
It's not entirely clear to me what you have in mind. ARE you proposing that Blitz++ arrays be the low-level implimentaiton of Numarray?, or just that there be an easy way to switch between them.
In the first case, it was considered a coupl eof years ago, and rejected (as far as I could tell) mainly for reasons of portability: Blitz++ makes heavy use of templates, which are not well supported by the very wide variety of compilers that Python is supported on. One of the goals of Numarray is to make it into the Python standard library, and use of C++ and templates would preclude that, at least in the foreseeable future.
Here's one discussion about it:
http://www.geocrawler.com/mail/thread.php3?subject=%5BNumpy-discussion%5D+Me...
If that url doesn't work, I found it by searching google for:
Numpy-discussion blitz++
If you are proposing the second: that there could be an easy bridge between Numarray and Blitz++ (maybe using Boost Python somehow?) so that Blitz++ arrays could be used to write Numarray extensions, I'm all for it! I think the community would gain a great deal from an easier to use API for writing compiled Numarray functions. Besides making it easier for those of us that find the need for custom extensions, it would make it much easier for people to write and contibute high performance general purpose code--resulting in a much expanded library for Numarray and SciPy.
-Chris