Release Notes for numarray-1.1 Numarray is an array processing package designed to efficiently manipulate large multi-dimensional arrays. Numarray is modelled after Numeric and features c-code generated from python template scripts, the capacity to operate directly on arrays in files, and improved type promotions. Although numarray-1.1 is predominantly a bugfix release, if you use numarray, I strongly recommend upgrading. I. ENHANCEMENTS 986194 Add SMP threading Build/install with --smp to enable ufuncs to release the GIL during their compute loops. You have to supply your own threads and partition your array computations among them to realize any SMP benefit. This adds overhead so don't do it unless you have multiple CPUs and know how to manage multiple compute threads. 1016142 CharArray eval() too slow CharArray.fasteval() was modified to use strtod() rather than Python's eval(). This makes it ~70x faster for converting CharArrays to NumArrays. fasteval() no longer works for complex types. eval() still works for everything. 989618 Document memmap.py (memory mapping) 996177 Unsigned int type support limited 1008968 Add kroenecker product II. BUGS FIXED / CLOSED 984286 max.reduce of byteswapped array Sebastian Haase reported that the reduction of large (>100KB) byteswapped arrays did not work correctly. This bug affected reductions and accumulations of byteswapped and misaligned arrays causing them to produce incorrect answers. Thanks Sebastian! 1011456 numeric compatibility byteoffset numarray's Numeric compatibility C-API didn't correctly account for the byte offsets produced by sub-arrays and array slices. This was fixed by re-defining the meaning of the ->data pointer in the PyArrayObject struct to include byteoffset. NA_OFFSETDATA() was likewise redefined to return ->data rather than ->data + ->byteoffset. Correctly written code is still source compatible. Incorrectly written code will generally be transparently fixed. Code which accounted for byteoffset without using NA_OFFSETDATA() will break. This bug affected functions in numarray.numeric as well as add-on packages like numarray.linear_algebra and numarray.fft. 1009462 matrixmultiply (a,b) leaves b transposed Many people reported this side effect. Thanks to all. 919297 Windows build fails VC++ 7.0 964356 random_array.randint exceeds boundaries 985710 buffer not aligned on 8 byte boundary (Windows-98 broken) 990328 Object Array repr for >1000 elements 997898 Invalid sequences errors 1004600 Segfault in array element deletion 1005537 Incorrect handling of overlapping assignments in Numarray 1008375 Weirdness with 'new' method 1008462 searchsorted bug and fix 1009309 randint bug fix patch 1015896 a.is_c_array() mixed int/bool results 1016140 argsort of string arrays See http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=450446&group_id=1369&func=browse for more details. III. CAUTIONS 1. This release is binary incompatible with numarray-1.0. Writers of C-extensions which directly reference the byteoffset field of the PyArrayObject should be aware that the data pointer is now the sum of byteoffset and the buffer base pointer. All C extensions which use the numarray C-API must be recompiled. This incompatibility was an unfortunate consequence of the fix for "numeric compatibility byteoffset". WHERE ----------- Numarray-1.1 windows executable installers, source code, and manual is here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1369 Numarray is hosted by Source Forge in the same project which hosts Numeric: http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/ The web page for Numarray information is at: http://stsdas.stsci.edu/numarray/index.html Trackers for Numarray Bugs, Feature Requests, Support, and Patches are at the Source Forge project for NumPy at: http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=1369 REQUIREMENTS ------------------------------ numarray-1.1 requires Python 2.2.2 or greater. AUTHORS, LICENSE ------------------------------ Numarray was written by Perry Greenfield, Rick White, Todd Miller, JC Hsu, Paul Barrett, Phil Hodge at the Space Telescope Science Institute. We'd like to acknowledge the assitance of Francesc Alted, Paul Dubois, Sebastian Haase, Tim Hochberg, Nadav Horesh, Edward C. Jones, Eric Jones, Jochen Kuepper, Travis Oliphant, Pearu Peterson, Peter Verveer, Colin Williams, and everyone else who has contributed with comments and feedback. Numarray is made available under a BSD-style License. See LICENSE.txt in the source distribution for details. -- Todd Miller jmiller@stsci.edu