[Numpy-discussion] It's so *quiet* I'm testing numpy-discussion

[Travis Oliphant]

I'm busy finishing Numeric3.  It has made quite a bit of progress.  It 
can be checked out of CVS and played with.   Implementing the 
multidimensional indexing magic of numarray is taking a bit of time, 
though.  I'd like to support mixed integer indexing, boolean indexing, 
and slicing too.    Any help on this would be greatly appreciated.

I'm very confident that record arrays are going to work.   The new 
numeric object has a getfield method that lets you interpret subitem 
slices as a new type of array.  The new void * type arrays let the array 
be a collection of anything.  Constructing the fanciness of numarray 
record arrays will just be a matter of an appropriate Python container 
class or subclass.  I think all the requirements to do this are already 
done in Numeric3.

I've added a possible UPDATEIFCOPY flag to the requirements argument in 
PyArray_FromAny that will tell an array to copy back to the original 
upon deletion if this flag is set.

Typecodes are handled by a TypecodeConverter function that takes quite a 
few different types of arguments including an arbitrary Python object 
with a type_num and itemsize attribute.  This allows a lot of 
flexibility in how types are specified.

Multi-byte character and unicode arrays already seem to work reasonably 
well.  There is a lot more testing that needs to be done, of course.

I would also love feedback and/or help on the PEP that I've started.  It 
is online at numeric.scipy.org but that copy may be a few days behind 
the CVS version at sourceforge.

-Travis