Perry Greenfield wrote:
It's not a new idea. I raised it some time ago and I don't think it was
I wasn't claiming authorship, sorry if it sounded like that :) In fact, I remember specifically talking with you about this at scipy'03, in the context of small array performance issues for the at-the-time-nascent numarray, and I'm sure similar things have been done many times before. I've had it floating in my head since I first saw blitz, back in 2001, and blitz probably got it from... There's nothing really new under the sun ;)
new then either. I have to believe that if you allowed only Float64 (and perhaps a complex variant) and used other restrictions then it would be much faster for small arrays. One would think it would be much easier to implement than Numeric/numarray/numpy... I've always thought that those looking for really fast small array performance would be better served by something like this. But you'd really have to fight off feature creep. ("This almost meets my needs. If it could only do xxx")
Couldn't that last issue be well dealt with by the fact that today's numpy is fairly subclassing-friendly? (which, if I remember correctly, wasn't quite the case with at least old Numeric). Cheers, f