
On Wednesday 09 February 2005 11:24 am, Perry Greenfield wrote:
Sebastian Haase wrote:
(RE: numarray) Hi, On an Opteron (Suse9) I was happy to see that I could allocate the memory for an Int32-1024x1024x1024 cube. (On a P4 a get 'MemoryError'). I remember that Todd always said that python itself wasn't 64bit-ready yet. But why is it needed to support >4GB python-lists if one is only interested in large numarrays (or numeric) ?
In short, to support the Python sequence protocol (arrays can be used anywhere Python code expects sequences transparently).
Perry, Thanks for the answer - that's about what I remembered. Is is conceivable to have a compiler flag (#define) to turn all the sequence protocol support off ? (How many places in the numarray code would that be?) I think the wish to just allocate large arrays and (even if in a very limited way!) work with them is clearly shared by many people. I always felt having a Py-List longer than billons of elements would have a rather low priority in comparison. Thanks again, Sebastian
The good news is that work is well underway in Python to change the limit on sequence indices. I think it will take a number of months for these changes to make it out (in a released version of Python as well as the necessary updates to numarray). As soon as the changes are committed to Python CVS, we can start working on updates to numarray to support them.
Perry Greenfield