[Numpy-discussion] Toward release 1.0 of NumPy

[Sasha]

On 4/12/06, Travis Oliphant <oliphant at ee.byu.edu> wrote:
> ...        This also dove-tails nicely
> with the Python 2.5 release schedule so that NumPy 1.0 should work with
> Python 2.5 and be fully 64-bit capable for handling very-large arrays.
>

I would like to mention one feature that is going to appear in Python
2.5 that is covering some of the functionality of NumPy.  I am talking
about the ctypes module
<http://starship.python.net/crew/theller/ctypes/tutorial.html>.  Like
NumPy, ctypes provides a set of python classes that represent basic C
types:

        c_byte
        c_char
        c_char_p
        c_double
        c_float
        c_int
        c_long
        c_short
        c_ubyte
         ...

and the ability to describe composite structures.  The later
functionality is very close to what dtype class provides in numpy.

There are some features in ctype that I like better than similar
features in numpy.  For example, in ctypes a fixed width array is
described by multiplying basic type by an integer:

>>> c_char * 10
<class '__main__.c_char_Array_10'>

I find this approach more elegant than numpy's dtype('S10').

It looks like there is some synergy to be exploited here, particularly
in the area of record arrays.