[Numpy-discussion] Some comments on the Numeric3 Draft of 1-Mar-05

[Colin J. Williams]

Travis Oliphant wrote:

> Colin J. Williams wrote:
>
>>
>> My understanding was that there was to be a new builtin 
>> multiarray/Array class/type which eventually would replace the 
>> existing array.ArrayType.  Thus, for a time at least, there would be 
>> at least one new class/type.
>
>
> The new type will actually be in the standard library.   For backwards 
> compatibility we will not be replacing the existing array.ArrayType 
> but providing an additional ndarray.ndarray (or some such name -- the 
> name hasn't been finalized yet).
>
>>
>> In addition, it seemed to be proposed that the new class/type would 
>> not just be Array but Array_with_Int32, Array_with_Float64 etc..  I'm 
>> not too clear on this latter point but Konrad says that there would 
>> not be this multiplicity of basic class/type's.
>
>
> The arrays have always been homogeneous collections of "something".  
> This 'something' has been indicated by typecodes characters (Numeric) 
> or Python classes (numarray).  The proposal is that the "something" 
> that identifies what the homogeneous arrays are collections of will be 
> actual type objects.    Some of these type objects are just 
> "organizational types" which help to classify the different kinds of 
> homogeneous arrays.   The "leaf-node" types are also the types of new 
> Python scalars that act as a transition layer between ndarrays with 
> their variety of objects and traditional Python bool, int, float, 
> complex, string, and unicode objects which do not "understand" that 
> they could be considered as 0-dimensional arrays.
>
Thanks.  This clarifies things.  These 'somethingTypes' would presumably 
not be in the standard library but in some module like 
Numeric3.numerictypes.

Colin W.