
Hi all I'm delighted to announce the release of Ironclad v0.8 -- the all-singing, all-dancing CPython API compatibility layer for IronPython -- available now from http://code.google.com/p/ironclad/ . Notable improvements over the last release include: * Ironclad is now a neatly self-contained package -- just copy to your site-packages and 'import ironclad'. * No more silly requirement to call ironclad.shutdown() when you're finished. * A few performance improvements. * Over 900 NumPy tests now pass: in fact, almost all the tests from the core, fft, lib, linalg, ma, oldnumeric and random subpackages. * Over half the .pyds distributed with CPython 2.5 now import cleanly; some of them appear to actually work, including _hashlib and _elementtree. Ironclad grows more stable and mature with every release, and I urge IronPython users to try it out and share their impressions: feedback, whether positive or negative, is always welcomed. Cheers William

Hello William,
* A few performance improvements. * Over 900 NumPy tests now pass: in fact, almost all the tests from the core, fft, lib, linalg, ma, oldnumeric and random subpackages. I have some questions here for the science interested. I hope that they are not too specific:
* Can you also use scipy with IronClad/ResolverOne (RO)? * Can you recognize arrays with datetime objects in RO? * How is datetime information handled in RO? * What about rpy? If all the above were working in RO, it would be terrific!
Ironclad grows more stable and mature with every release, and I urge IronPython users to try it out and share their impressions: feedback, whether positive or negative, is always welcomed. You may find some information here: http://groups.google.com/group/python-excel/msg/eb349c229696c7f7
I would also recommend this nice & straightforward video http://www.resolversystems.com/screencasts/numpy/ Kind regards, Timmie

Hi Tim Thank you for your interest! To answer your various questions order of approximately increasing complexity: Most importantly: the currently available version of Resolver One does not have numpy support built in, and for various reasons I wouldn't advise trying to integrate Ironclad with v1.3; please wait for 1.4 :-). I just downloaded R and rpy2; they don't work with Ironclad at the moment, and I'm not yet sure why. Ironclad shouldn't require any special installation: just copy the ironclad package (containing __init__.py, python25.dll and ironclad.dll) to wherever you normally put packages for IronPython (I personally have my IRONPYTHONPATH pointing to the appropriate subdirectories of a standard Python 2.5 install). Clearly my documentation is currently inadequate; I'll have to work on that for the next release. RO uses .NET DateTime objects by default, but it's perfectly possible to use python datetime objects instead; I can confirm that you can put both those datatypes into numpy arrays. While RO doesn't have an explicit CSV/TSV import option, you should be able to paste data in those formats directly into your worksheets; and, as soon as we have numpy integration out in the wild, you should be able to create ndarrays directly from your data files. Scipy support is coming along surprisingly nicely; I'd sort of forgotten about it until a couple of people asked me about it earlier today, and it turns out -- to my surprise and delight -- that it took very little work to get the SVN head running over 800 of the scipy tests (even if you can't just 'import scipy' without errors). Sadly, a lot of the modules seem to use scipy.sparse, which I can't import... yet ;-). So, we haven't built any scipy support into Resolver One yet, but hopefully we'll be able to do so without too much pain. Finally, I'm glad you like my screencast :-). I hope I haven't missed anything; let me know if I have, or if I can help with anything else. William On 29 Jan 2009, at 23:46, Tim Michelsen wrote:
Hello William,
* A few performance improvements. * Over 900 NumPy tests now pass: in fact, almost all the tests from the core, fft, lib, linalg, ma, oldnumeric and random subpackages. I have some questions here for the science interested. I hope that they are not too specific:
* Can you also use scipy with IronClad/ResolverOne (RO)? * Can you recognize arrays with datetime objects in RO? * How is datetime information handled in RO? * What about rpy?
If all the above were working in RO, it would be terrific!
Ironclad grows more stable and mature with every release, and I urge IronPython users to try it out and share their impressions: feedback, whether positive or negative, is always welcomed. You may find some information here: http://groups.google.com/group/python-excel/msg/eb349c229696c7f7
I would also recommend this nice & straightforward video http://www.resolversystems.com/screencasts/numpy/
Kind regards, Timmie

Hello William, once again. I just noticed that Resolver One can only import data from Excel. In science, the common low level data exchange format is ASCII text like: CSV or tab separated. You may consider adding this. I did not find any installation instructions contained in the docs for the IronClad binaries. Where am I to put the files? Can Resolver One also recognize the python installation which is already installed on the system? Thanks in advance for answering! Kind regards, Timmie
participants (2)
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Tim Michelsen
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William Reade