[Python-Dev] numerical models and numpy

[Paul F. Dubois]

I'm a little worried that you all may be assuming that I'm keeping up with
this flood of stuff on python-dev about the numerical model. I have tried
but I just can't manage that much volume. My silence doesn't mean approval.

Whatever "native" types you decide on there will be considerable pressure on
us to include corresponding types in Numerical Python, but I don't think
that can happen. At the moment there seem to be few people with any time to
spare to help me. I won't be able to do such work myself as my job just has
no use for decimals, rationals, etc.

My community would like a native Python type corresponding to a C float (and
a corresponding complex made out of two floats). Numpy already has those. I
was considering just hacking the source file for the native Python type
corresponding to a C double -- until I looked at it. What a complicated
beast it is. I have room in my draft implementation of PEP 242 for the beast
and I was going to do it in there.

To those of you thinking about this that haven't read PEP 242, please do so.
The Fortran committee thought hard about these issues and concluded that
some numeric "types" are not really different types but different "kinds" of
the same basic type.

-- Paul