[Numpy-discussion] 1.5 release schedule proposal

[Pauli Virtanen]

Tue, 27 Jul 2010 10:50:51 -0700, Christopher Barker wrote:

> Pauli Virtanen wrote:
>> Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:37:56 -0600, Jed Ludlow wrote:
>>> On Tue, Jul 27, 2010 at 2:38 AM, Pauli Virtanen <pav at iki.fi> wrote:
>>>> One low-hanging fruit to fix could be np.fromfile raising MemoryError
>>>> when it encounters EOF, and other bugs in that part of the code.
>>> The EOF bug in np.fromfile may already be fixed:
>>>
>>> http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/1152
>> 
>> Ok, so nothing needs to be done to that, then.
> 
> Maybe not with that bug, but there are a number of others -- fromfile()
> really needs some attention (for text reading, anyway). I got as far as
> identifying some issues, but got a bit lost in the depth of complex C
> and numpy's abstraction of types (template system?).
> 
> These are a couple relevant tickets;
> 
> http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/909
> http://projects.scipy.org/numpy/ticket/883

The relevant thing for 1.5.x would probably be to check that fromfile/
fromstring handle malformed data in a well-specified way, and being 
compatible with previous behavior.

I don't think we want to start changing the behavior (error handling etc) 
or feature set of fromfile at this point. It's a low-level function, and 
meant to be one.

The correct solution is probably to improve the speed (and possibly 
extend the feature set) of `loadtxt`, especially as the previous thread 
started from the observation that although `loadtxt` did what was 
desired, it was too slow for big files.

Cheers,
Pauli