[Numpy-discussion] PEP 242 Numeric kinds

[José Fonseca]

On Thu, Dec 05, 2002 at 05:02:26PM -0800, Paul F Dubois wrote:
> Since it really only interests
> scientific programmers I propose simply making it a separate deliverable
> on the Numeric site and withdrawing the PEP.

I'm not fully aware about the advantages/implications of puting Numeric
in Python standard library, but to say that the manipulation of numeric
arrays is only of interest to scientific programmers is the same of when
in the early computing days engineers saing that computers would only be
good for crunching numbers, and that the concept of personal computers
was just non-sense...

For a non-scientic usage of Numeric see the examples in
http://www.pygame.org/pcr/repository.php, but I can imagine the
usefullness of Numeric in many more non-scientific applications:
imaging, sound visualization plugins, 3D graphics, and probably much
more.

The use of Numeric can speed up alot of algorithms which would be
otherwise very slow in pure Python, and therefore forcing one to write C
extensions. That's why IMHO something with the Numeric functionality
should exist in the Python standard library.

Note that this is not the same that saying that Numeric should be
included as is - perhaps it's better to have it seperately to let it
mature more, perhaps not - but still, there is much more than a niche
interest around it.

José Fonseca
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