While I'm flooding the mailing list with interface issues, I thought I would air another one (again, for numarray only). We've had some people internally complain that it does not make sense for repr to always generate a string capable of reconstructing the array. We often (usually) deal with multi-megabyte arrays. Typing a variable interactively for one of these arrays is invariably nonsensical. In such cases the user would be much better served by a message indicating the size, shape, type, etc. of the array than all of its contents. Yet on the other hand, it is undeniably convenient to use repr (by typing a variable) for small arrays interactively rather than using a print statement. This leads to 3 possible proposals for handling repr: 1) Do what is done now, always print a string that when eval'ed will recreate the array. 2) Only give summary information for the array regardless of its size. 3) Print the array if it has fewer than THRESHOLD number of elements, otherwise print a summary. THRESHOLD may be adjusted by the user. The last appears to be the most utilitarian to us, yet 'impure' somehow. Certainly there are may objects for which Python does not attempt to generate a string from repr that could be used with eval to recreate them. On the other hand, we are unaware of cases where repr sometimes does and sometimes does not. For example, strings may also get very large, but there is no threshold for generating the string. What do people think the most desirable solution? Keep in mind we intend to develop very efficient functions that will convert arrays to and from ascii representations (currently most of that code is in Python and quite slow in numarray at the moment) so it will not be necessary to use repr for this purpose. Only a few more issues to go, hopefully... Perry