[Numpy-discussion] numpy or scipy ?

[David Cournapeau]

On Mon, 2008-09-08 at 22:05 -0600, Charles R Harris wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Sep 8, 2008 at 9:03 PM, xiaojf <FDU.xiaojf at gmail.com> wrote:
>         Hi all,
>         
>         I'm trying to replace matlab with python in my daily work and
>         I have
>         several problems now.
>         
>         1) Which one should I use, numpy or scipy ? I found that numpy
>         and
>         scipy have many overlap functions and modules, such as
>         numpy.linalg
>         and scipy.linaly.
>         
>         Maybe I should use numpy in some occasions and use scipy in
>         the other
>         occasions?
> 
> Numpy is the base, Scipy is a supplement.

To complete what Charles said, to compare with matlab:
	- numpy is the core of the scientific stack for python.
	- scipy is built on the top of numpy: it leverages numpy and can be
seen as a set of toolboxes for numpy.
	- matplotlib gives you something similar to matlab plotting
capabilities.

Numpy is more restricted than what bare matlab (wo any toolbox) can do:
basic linear algebra (inverse, eigen values, cholesky and a few more),
basic fft and random generators. With scipy, you should get almost
everything available in bare matlab, plus some features found in
toolboxes (mostly signal and statistics toolboxes), but not all.

cheers,

David