[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] a few thoughts

[Jim Fulton, U.S. Geological Survey]

On Thu, 19 Oct 1995 14:43:29 -0400 (EDT) 
David Ascher said:
> Paul Dubois' comments struck a chord with me.  While I appreciate the
> cleanliness of python's generic containers, I am painfully aware of the
> slowness of python's operations on, say, sound files with thousands of
> elements, to take a mid-size example. 
> 
> 1. How fervently are people opposed to splitting the array/tensors in
>    terms of element type?  One array for any python object, and one for
>    numbers, all of the same type (one type per array).  The two array
>    types could have the same interface, but one could use the uniformity
>    of its elements' types for optimization.
> 
> 2. Am I right that this dichotomy would allow massive optimization?

The current proposal is for homogenous matrices.  So also supporting
heterogenous matrices would not allow any additional optimizaton.
Note also that the current proposal also allows homogenous matrices of
characters, to aid in interfacing to Fortran routines with character
arguments. 

Jim


=================
MATRIX-SIG  - SIG on Matrix Math for Python

send messages to: matrix-sig@python.org
administrivia to: matrix-sig-request@python.org
=================