[Numpy-discussion] Home for pyhdf5io?

[Robert Kern]

On Sat, May 23, 2009 at 15:41, David Warde-Farley <dwf at cs.toronto.edu> wrote:
> On 23-May-09, at 4:25 PM, Albert Thuswaldner wrote:
>
>> Actually my vision with pyhdf5io is to have hdf5 to replace numpy's
>> own binary file format (.npy, npz). Pyhdf5io (or an incarnation of it)
>> should be the standard (binary) way to store data in scipy/numpy. A
>> bold statement, I know, but I think that it would be an improvement,
>> especially for those users how are replacing Matlab with sicpy/numpy.
>
> In that it introduces a dependency on pytables (and the hdf5 C
> library) I doubt it would be something the numpy core developers would
> be eager to adopt.
>
> The npy and npz formats (as best I can gather) exist so that there is
> _some_ way of persisting data to disk that ships with numpy. It's not
> meant necessarily as the best way, or as an interchange format, just
> as something that works "out of the box", the code for which is
> completely contained within numpy.

Yes. The full set of use cases and design constraints are considered here:

  http://svn.scipy.org/svn/numpy/trunk/doc/neps/npy-format.txt

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
though it had an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco