[SciPy-dev] Re: [AstroPy] Python version of IDL Astron library

[Perry Greenfield]

On Sep 13, 2004, at 8:20 PM, Travis E. Oliphant wrote:
>
> The reality is that Numarray is not ready as a drop-in replacement for 
> Numeric but people keep introducing it to new users as if it were 
> ready.   This is a real problem in the community right now.
>
> These issues have been discussed before and are on the scipy.org wiki 
> that Eric has started.  Basically the issues preventing a drop-in 
> replacement are 1) small arrays are too slow, 2) no 
> backward-compatible ufunc C-API --- nothing like the compatibility API 
> for arrays exists for ufuncs.  3) migrating legacy code is way too 
> time consuming and effort filled for almost no gain.
>
> While not optimal the current best solution is to make Numarray more 
> aware of Numeric arrays and vice versa, so that unnecessary memory 
> copying is not happening.
>
Well, we want to go beyond that to the point that scipy and other 
Numeric packages can support numarray and Numeric simultaneously. We 
intend to do most of the work to make it so with scipy. f2py already 
has been adapted to work with numarray, and we would
also take a look at the ufunc api issue to deal with that. I think we 
should start
on this fairly soon (certainly within a month or so). This is pretty 
much our
highest priority now that numarray 1.1 is out.

Perry