[Numpy-discussion] Some comments on the Numeric3 Draft of 1-M ar-05

[Sebastien.deMentendeHorne at electrabel.com]

> It might be useful to have a Table type where there is a header of some
sort to keep track, 
> for each column of the column name name and the datatype in that column,
so that the user 
> could, optionally specify validity checks.


Another useful type for arrays representing physical values would be an
array that keeps vectors for each dimension with index values. For instance,
an object representing temperature at a given time in a given location would
consist in
    data = N x M array of Float64 = [ [ 23, 34, 23], [ 31, 28,29] ]
    first_axis = N array of time = [ "01/01/2004", "02/01/2004" ]
    second_axis = M array of location = [ "Paris", "New York" ]

All slicing operation would equivalently slice the corresponding axis.
Assignment between arrays would be axis coherent (assigning "Paris" in one
array to "Paris" in another while putting NaN or 0 if there is no
correspondance).
If indexing could also be done via component of *_axis, it would be also
useful.

Several field of applications could benefit of this (econometrics, monte
carlo simulation, physical simulation, time series,...). In fact most of
real data consist usually of values for tuples of general indices (e.g.
temparature@("01/01/2004","Paris"))

Hmmm, I think I was just thinking aloud :-)


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