Paul Dubois writes:
I have verified that this package seems to work on Windows. I says seems only because I didn't try enough to uncover anything subtle.
Thanks! If you run maparray.py from the command-line, it runs a basic regression test suite, which doesn't really try enough to uncover anything subtle either.
Unless or until we are convinced as a community that this is (a) the right way to do this and (b) that the package is portable, it would not be wise to put it in the main distribution.
Well, I'm not the community, but I'll state my arguments. On (a): I don't know about the right way to do it; as I'm sure is obvious, I'm new to extending Numerical Python in C, but I doubt there's a simpler way to do it ("it" being seeing the contents of files as Numeric arrays), and I think it does work as well as it's possible to get it to work without major hacking of Numeric (to support read-only arrays) or the mmap module (to prevent closing an open object, to allow read-only mmapping on Windows). The other things on the wishlist are basically features to add --- "start" and "size" arguments to maparray(), a "create-a-file" argument to maparray(), etc., and don't change the basic structure. On (b): it depends on two-argument mmap.mmap(), open(), <file>.fileno(), and os.fstat(). The major portability hurdle there is probably mmap.mmap(), but that's OK.
I would like to hear from the community about this so that I will know whether or not to add this package as a separate SourceForge 'package' within the Numerical Python area. Meantime I will add a link to the web page.
I would too. There have been downloads from something like 50 IP addresses, but I've only heard from three people.