can this be made faster?

[A. M. Archibald]

> > > > c contains arbitray floats.
> > > > essentially it is to compute class totals
> > > > as in total[class[i]] += value[i]

> > This seems like a rather common operation - I know I've needed it on
> > at least two occasions - is it worth creating some sort of C
> > implementation? What is the appropriate generalization?
>
> Some sort of indirect addressing infrastructure. But it looks like this
> could be tricky to make safe, it would need to do bounds checking at the
> least and would probably work best with a contiguous array as the target. I
> could see some sort of low-level function called argassign(target, indirect
> index, source) that could be used to build more complicated things in
> python.

If it were only assignment that was needed, fancy indexing could
already handle it. The problem is that this is something that can't
*quite* be done with the current fancy indexing infrastructure - every
time an index comes up we want to add the value to what's there,
rather than replacing it. I suppose histogram covers one major
application; in fact if histogram allowed weightings ("count this
point as -0.6") it would solve the OP's problem.

A. M. Archibald

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