[Numpy-discussion] Plans for Numpy 1.4.0 and scipy 0.8.0

Neil Crighton neilcrighton at gmail.com
Mon Jun 22 16:12:53 EDT 2009


David Cournapeau <cournape <at> gmail.com> writes:

> >>> David Cournapeau wrote:
> >>> > (Continuing the discussion initiated in the neighborhood iterator
> >>> > thread)
> >>> >     - Chuck suggested to drop python < 2.6 support from now on. I am
> >>> > against it without a very strong and detailed rationale, because many OS
> >>> > still don't have python 2.6 (RHEL, Ubuntu LTS).
> >>>
> >>> I vote against dropping support for python 2.5. Personally I have no
> >>> incentive to upgrade to 2.6 and am very happy with 2.5.
> >>
> >> Will requiring python-2.6 help the developers port numpy to python-3?
> >>
> >
> > Can't really say at this point, but it is the suggested path to
> > python-3.
> 
> OTOH, I don't find the python 3 "official" transition story very
> convincing. I have tried to gather all the information I could find,
> both on the python wiki and from transitions stories. To support both
> python 2 and 3, the suggestion is to use the 2to3 script, but it is
> painfully slow for big packages like numpy. And there ave very few
> stories for porting python 3 C extensions.
> 
> Another suggestion is to avoid breaking the API when transitioning for
> python 3. But that seems quite unrealistic. How do we deal with the
> removing of string/long APIs ? This will impact the numpy API as well,
> so how do we deal with it ?
> 

As I understand this suggestion, they just hope external packages don't say
'Hey, if we're breaking backwards compatibility anyway, lets take the chance to
do a whole lot of extra API breakage!'  That way, if people have problems 
migrating to the new version, they know they're likely to be python 3 related.
Jarrod Millman's blog post about numpy and python 3 mentions this: 

http://jarrodmillman.blogspot.com/2009/01/when-will-numpy-and-scipy-migrate-to.html

> Also, there does not seem to be any advantages for python 3 for
> scientific people ?
> 

I think there are lots of advantages in python 3 for scientific people.  The 
new integer division alone is a huge improvement.  I've been bitten by this 
(1/2 = 0) several times in the past, and the only reason I'm not bitten by it 
now is that I've trained myself to always type things like 1./x, which look 
ugly.

The reorganisation of the standard library and the removal of duplicate ways of
doing things in the core also makes the language much easier to learn. This 
isn't a huge gain for people already familiar with Python's idiosyncracies, but
it's important for people first coming to the language.

Print becoming a function would have been a pain for interactive work, but 
happily ipython auto-parentheses takes care of that.

You could argue that moving to python 3 isn't attractive because there isn't 
any scientific library support, but then that's because numpy hasn't been 
ported to python 3 yet ;)


Neil



 





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