In working on the pull request to implement this, I've run in to some trouble

in picking the right module structure for the new Cython modules. I'm posting

here to see if we can get a few better ideas that what I currently have.

In the long run, I'd like to leave space so that wrappers that operate on

memoryviews instead of just pointers can be added to scipy.linalg.

This would, ultimately mean that there would be several new modules added

in scipy.linalg. One for each the sets of function pointers corresponding

to BLAS and LAPACK, and one for each of the modules defining routines

that operate on memoryviews.

I'm fairly certain that the C-compiled tests that are currently there

should not be included in the tests directories. I've never seen that

done anywhere else and was unable to get it working when I tried here.

One option would be to rewrite the tests so that they use Python

callable versions of the new Cython wrappers to test for correctness.

That will take me a little more time, but it is probably the best solution.

My current favorite idea for the structure is to do this

linalg/

cython_blas_pointers (function pointers, already written)

cython_blas (memory view versions, to be added later)

cython_lapack_pointers (function pointers, already written)

cython_lapack (memory view versions, to be added later)

and then rewrite the tests in pure Python using function calls to cython_blas

and cython_lapack for the functions that I have tests for.

The names here are up for discussion too. The fact that these are function

pointers is really just an implementation detail, but I'm not really sure what else

to call the raw function pointer interface. It seems to be the most descriptive

choice, since these are function pointers that operate on pointers to arrays.

If we wanted shorter module names we could do

linalg/

cyblas

cyblas_ptrs

cylapack

cylapack_ptrs

Another alternative would be to put these modules all in a new submodule

of scipy.linalg. The current version in the pull request does this, but

the submodule is called "cython" and that is causing name collision issues.

The submodule could instead be called "cylinalg" or "cython_wrappers", or

something else along those lines.

What are your thoughts?

Thanks!

-Ian