ANN: numarray-1.1

[Todd Miller]

Release Notes for numarray-1.1

Numarray is an array processing package designed to efficiently
manipulate large multi-dimensional arrays.  Numarray is modelled after
Numeric and features c-code generated from python template scripts,
the capacity to operate directly on arrays in files, and improved type
promotions.

Although numarray-1.1 is predominantly a bugfix release, if you use
numarray, I strongly recommend upgrading.

I. ENHANCEMENTS

986194	Add SMP threading

Build/install with --smp to enable ufuncs to release the GIL during
their compute loops.  You have to supply your own threads and
partition your array computations among them to realize any SMP
benefit.  This adds overhead so don't do it unless you have multiple
CPUs and know how to manage multiple compute threads.

1016142	CharArray eval() too slow

CharArray.fasteval() was modified to use strtod() rather than Python's
eval().  This makes it ~70x faster for converting CharArrays to
NumArrays.  fasteval() no longer works for complex types.  eval() 
still works for everything.

989618	Document memmap.py (memory mapping)
996177	Unsigned int type support limited
1008968	Add kroenecker product

II. BUGS FIXED / CLOSED

984286	max.reduce of byteswapped array

Sebastian Haase reported that the reduction of large (>100KB)
byteswapped arrays did not work correctly.  This bug affected
reductions and accumulations of byteswapped and misaligned arrays
causing them to produce incorrect answers.  Thanks Sebastian!

1011456	numeric compatibility byteoffset	  

numarray's Numeric compatibility C-API didn't correctly account for
the byte offsets produced by sub-arrays and array slices.  This was
fixed by re-defining the meaning of the ->data pointer in the
PyArrayObject struct to include byteoffset.  NA_OFFSETDATA() was
likewise redefined to return ->data rather than ->data + ->byteoffset.
Correctly written code is still source compatible.  Incorrectly
written code will generally be transparently fixed.  Code which
accounted for byteoffset without using NA_OFFSETDATA() will break.
This bug affected functions in numarray.numeric as well as add-on
packages like numarray.linear_algebra and numarray.fft.

1009462	matrixmultiply (a,b) leaves b transposed

Many people reported this side effect.  Thanks to all.

919297	Windows build fails VC++ 7.0
964356	random_array.randint exceeds boundaries	
985710	buffer not aligned on 8 byte boundary  (Windows-98 broken)
990328	Object Array repr for >1000 elements
997898	Invalid sequences errors
1004600	Segfault in array element deletion
1005537	Incorrect handling of overlapping assignments in Numarray
1008375	Weirdness with 'new' method
1008462	searchsorted bug and fix
1009309	randint bug fix patch
1015896	a.is_c_array() mixed int/bool results
1016140	argsort of string arrays

See
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?atid=450446&group_id=1369&func=browse
for more details.

III. CAUTIONS

1. This release is binary incompatible with numarray-1.0.  Writers of
C-extensions which directly reference the byteoffset field of the
PyArrayObject should be aware that the data pointer is now the sum of
byteoffset and the buffer base pointer.  All C extensions which use
the numarray C-API must be recompiled.  This incompatibility was an
unfortunate consequence of the fix for "numeric compatibility
byteoffset".


WHERE
-----------

Numarray-1.1 windows executable installers, source code, and manual is
here:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1369

Numarray is hosted by Source Forge in the same project which hosts
Numeric:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/numpy/

The web page for Numarray information is at:

http://stsdas.stsci.edu/numarray/index.html

Trackers for Numarray Bugs, Feature Requests, Support, and Patches are
at the Source Forge project for NumPy at:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=1369

REQUIREMENTS
------------------------------

numarray-1.1 requires Python 2.2.2 or greater.  


AUTHORS, LICENSE
------------------------------

Numarray was written by Perry Greenfield, Rick White, Todd Miller, JC
Hsu, Paul Barrett, Phil Hodge at the Space Telescope Science
Institute.  We'd like to acknowledge the assitance of Francesc Alted,
Paul Dubois, Sebastian Haase, Tim Hochberg, Nadav Horesh, Edward
C. Jones, Eric Jones, Jochen Kuepper, Travis Oliphant, Pearu Peterson,
Peter Verveer, Colin Williams, and everyone else who has contributed
with comments and feedback.

Numarray is made available under a BSD-style License.  See
LICENSE.txt in the source distribution for details.

-- 
Todd Miller             jmiller at stsci.edu