[Numpy-discussion] 2 i/o questions and an announcement

[nick at nickbower.com]

2 really quick questions and an announcement of sorts:

1) Is NumPy v2.0 going to address binary file io at all?  Right now, I 
use the array module with the "fromfile" method, but this then has to be 
re-cast to a NumPy array, which seems inefficient (although I've no 
evidence for that), especially for large 50-100 meg data files.

2) Is there a quicker way to get data from PIL to NumPy than:

data = array(Image.open(...).getdata(), typecode=Int)

this takes an eternity for a decent sized image (1.5 minutes on a P400 
for a 1200x1000 image).


Some of you may already know, but I've taken a first crack at an free 
clone of IDL (as in RSI's Interactive Data Language, which has 
similarities to MatLab).  Cohesive integration of 2D plotting/contouring 
(Dislin), 8/24-bit imaging (PIL) and array arithmetic (NumPy) has been 
implemented using standard IDL syntax - 
http://nickbower.com/computer/pydl

Cheers, nick.