[Numpy-discussion] Proposed Roadmap Overview

[David Gowers (kampu)]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 9:09 AM, Travis Oliphant <travis at continuum.io> wrote:

>       * incorporating a meta-object
>       * a few new dtypes (variable-length string, varialbe-length unicode and an enum type)
>       * simple computed fields for dtypes

>From the sound of that, I'm certainly looking forward to seeing some details
(like: Do you mean Pascal (length, content) style strings, AKA struct
code 'p'?; Read-only dtype fields computed via a callback function?).

>        * accepting a Data-Type specification as a class or JSON file

On that subject, I incidentally have implemented a pair of functions
(freeze()/thaw()) that make de/serialization to JSON or YAML fairly
simple.

(currently they leave fundamental dtypes as is. Basically the only
thing that would be necessary to render the result serializable
to/from JSON, is representing fundamental dtypes as JSON-safe objects
.. a string would probably do.)

http://paste.pocoo.org/show/552311/

(Modified slightly from code in my project here:
https://gitorious.org/bits/bits/blobs/master/dtype.py)

I've tried and failed to find a bug report for dtype serialization.
Should I create a new ticket for JSON deserialization?

(serialization wouldn't hurt either, since that would let us store
both an array's data/shape/etc and its dtype in the same JSON
document.)