[SciPy-user] HDF5 vs FITS (was: Fast saving/loading of huge matrices)

[Perry Greenfield]

On Apr 22, 2007, at 5:57 AM, Francesc Altet wrote:

>
> Well, I must recognize that I didn't know about STScI's TABLES  
> packages
> until a couple of years ago (when PyTables was already more than three
> years old), so no idea on the amount of overlap between both projects.
> However, I'd say that both projects are rather different in aims  
> or, at
> very least, on the formats that they are based on.  So, probably, most
> of the overlap would come basically from the similarity of the
> names ;-).  TABLES being born before 1998 has a clear precedence for
> reclaiming the name over PyTables which first public version was
> released in 2002, but as its application fields are quite different  
> (in
> principle), I don't think there is not much point in thinking about
> changing the name of the latter, IMO.

I'm not sure what the TABLES reference is to. STScI does have a  
package called TABLES, but it was developed for IRAF and has no  
Python heritage to it. It uses an entirely different environment to  
access FITS tables (it's actually based on CFITSIO). PyFITS also  
provides access to FITS tables. As I mentioned, since FITS tables  
have some special features, it isn't possible to deal with these  
conveniently with either numarray's or numpy's record arrays  
directly. Both have used a wrapping class to add these features.

Perry