[Numpy-discussion] fast numpy i/o

[Derek Homeier]

On 27.06.2011, at 6:36PM, Robert Kern wrote:

>> Some late comments on the note (I was a bit surprised that HDF5 installation seems to be a serious hurdle to many - maybe I've just been profiting from the fink build system for OS X here - but I also was not aware that the current netCDF is built on downwards-compatibility to the HDF5 standard, something useful learnt again...:-)
> 
> It's not so much that it's hard to build for lots of people. Rather,
> it would be quite difficult to include into numpy itself, particularly
> if we are just relying on distutils. numpy is too "fundamental" of a
> package to have extra dependencies.

I completely agree with that - I doubt that there is a standard data format that is both in wide use and simple enough to be easily included with numpy. Pyfits might be possible, but that again addresses probably a too specific user group. 

Cheers,
						Derek