numerical packages for 1.5.2?

[Fernando Pérez]

Mark Fardal wrote:

> 
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to do some scientific/numerical work with Python.  On the
> computers accessible to me, Python 1.5.2 is quite common but Python
> 2.x is not to be found anywhere.  I don't have root password to most
> of these computers.  I'd also like to share my code with
> collaborators, and don't want to make them upgrade Python itself
> (which is significantly harder than upgrading Python packages).  So,
> it looks like Python 1.5.2 is it for now.  These are mostly
> Linux/x86 systems with a few SGIs.
> 
> Given that restriction, what version of Numeric should I be using? 
> Is
> there a version of SciPy that will work on 1.5.2?  Are there known
> bugs in any of these versions I should watch out for?
> 
> thanks
> Mark Fardal
> University of Victoria

Why don't you just create a ~you/local/ directory and build py2.1 
there? It will take a half hour, and the improvements are 
substantial. You can just tell your friends to have an alias that 
points to ~you/local/bin/python for them to use it without upgrading 
anything.

Just an idea, since you lose some important features with python<2.0 
for numeric (such as rich comparisons: a<b for a,b arrays returns a 
number in old python, but a full array of a[i]<b[i] for the newer 
versions. This can make writing certain algorithms much easier and 
they also perform faster as the looping is done in C).

Cheers,
f