[Numpy-discussion] Generalized ufuncs?

[Engel, Hans-Andreas]

I am sorry that our submission
http://projects.scipy.org/scipy/numpy/ticket/887 has created some
annoyance; presumably we have taken the "Make contributions (e.g. code
patches), (...) by submitting a 'ticket' on the Trac pages linked below"
on http://scipy.org/Developer_Zone somewhat too literally.

It was great to receive very positive responses to our patch and to
receive a very timely review; this is encouraging for submitting code to
the numpy repository.  

I would like to add that the proposed change is not that arbitrary; it
is a well-established concept -- it is outlined on the
GeneralLoopingFunctions wiki page, and it is a prominent concept of
perl's PDL vector library.  Of course, there is still room for arguing
about details.

The fact that no explicit "generalized" ufuncs are provided, should in
my opinion not be an argument why not to include the change in the 1.2.0
release.  Writing extension libraries that implement such generalized
ufuncs, while being able to use the standard numpy distribution, would
certainly be very valuable.

Furthermore, the risk for including the proposed patch in 1.2.0 is very
low: existing functionality is not touched.  (Except the glitch we had
by declaring variables in a gcc-way.)  For standard ufuncs, it should be
straightforward to see that the patch does not modify the behavior at
all.

I wish everyone a great SciPy'08 conference and very much hope that you
can include the proposed functionality in the forthcoming NumPy release.

Best regards,
Hansres