konrad.hinsen@laposte.net wrote:

...

Did I overlook anything, or do I really have to re-implement things like 'sum', 'argmax', 'convolve', 'cos' in C?

Can you think of a real-life situation where you would want to call these from C? Usually, C modules using arrays are written to add functionality that can not be expressed efficiently in terms of existing array operations. If you want to compose things like sum and argmax, you can do that in Python.

Yes. Think of dynamic programming algorithms like forward, backward, and viterbi for Hidden Markov Models. In this case you cannot avoid a loop over one axis, yet the code in the loop can be expressed in a few lines by matrix operations like 'dot', 'sum', 'outerproduct', 'argmax', elementwise multiplication, etc. As an example, the forward algorithm can be written as alpha[0] = P_YcS[y[0]]*P_S0 gamma[0] = sum(alpha[0]) alpha[0] /= gamma[0] for t in xrange(1, T): P_ScY_1_prev = dot(P_ScS, alpha[t-1]) P_SYcY_1_prev = P_YcS[y[t]]*P_ScY_1_prev gamma[t] = sum(P_SYcY_1_prev) alpha[t] = P_SYcY_1_prev/gamma[t]

Note also that if you do need to call these routines from your C code, you can always do so via the generic Python API for calling Python functions. However, reimplementing them in C may often turn out to be simpler - doing sum() in C is really a trivial piece of work.

Sure, many array functions like 'sum' are easy to implement in C, but I don't want to, if don't have to for performance reasons. In an ideal world, I'd spend most of my time prototyping the algorithms in Python, and then, if performance is a problem, translate parts to C (or hand them to weave.blitz) with only minor changes to the prototype code. And if that's still not fast enough, then I'd go and rethink the problem in C. Referring to the example above, I'd also want that an optimized BLAS implementation of 'dot' be used if available, and the scipy_core substitute version if not. So yeah, I claim that, to make weave a truly useful tool, all array functions of the Python API should also be available in the C API. Maybe having a few specialized versions, e.g., for contiguous arrays of double floats, would be a good idea, too. Ralf

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konrad.hinsen@laposte.net wrote:

Did you consider Pyrex? It lets you move from pure Python to pure C with Python syntax, mixing both within a single function.

Forgot to say, I very much like the Pyrex approach, though. Ralf