Python evolution: Unease

[Terry Reedy]

"Bulba!" <bulba at bulba.com> wrote in message
> E.g. right now I would kill for a standard, built-in matrix
> type

The array types of Numerical Python (NumPy) and now Numarray are, defacto, 
Python's standard 1 to n dimensional array types.  Once installed, they are 
as builtin as anything else.  Several other packages build on top of them.

> that would be as flexible as lists and dictionaries are
> in Python, so that I could slurp the whole CSV file or some
> other table in one instruction into a matrix that could
> accomodate data types likes strings and floats (just like
> dictionaries do - just,  say, declare, "column 1 of matrix
> contains strings, and please convert the values in column 2
> into floats"), and then easily do some fancy matrix
> transformations.

Numarray has a record array type.  If there is not one publicly available, 
perhaps you could write a CSV file to record-array slurper and contribute 
it to the Recipes site or maybe even the CSV module.

Terry J. Reedy