[SciPy-dev] SciPy-dev] [patch] read/write v5 .mat files with structs, cell arrays, objects, or function handles

[David Cournapeau]

On Thu, Oct 2, 2008 at 11:14 PM, Vebjorn Ljosa <ljosa at broad.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> The reason Ray and I changed some of the representations is that we
> wanted the mapping from Matlab to Python to be symmetric: anything read
> from a MAT-file should be represented in a way that allows the writer
> code to write it back in its original form.  This requires that the
> original Matlab type be deducible from the Python representation.

FWIW, I agree completely that the current io for matlab would be
greatly improved by those changes; there is no arguing that those
changes should come in scipy. The problem is that some people have
code which depend on the current shortcoming (well, *I* have), and it
is better to have one full version at least which says that it will
change (with deprecation warning). The code could be in something like
io.newmaltlab, which would be changed to io.matlab in 0.8: this way,
if people want to use it now, they can.

cheers,

David