[Numpy-discussion] ANN: Numexpr 1.1, an efficient array evaluator

[Francesc Alted]

A Sunday 18 January 2009, jh at physics.ucf.edu escrigué:
> Francesc Alted wrote:
> > > > Numexpr is a fast numerical expression evaluator for NumPy. 
> > > > With it, expressions that operate on arrays (like "3*a+4*b")
> > > > are accelerated and use less memory than doing the same
> > > > calculation in Python.
> > >
> > > Please pardon my ignorance as I know this project has been around
> > > for a while.  It this looks very exciting, but either it's
> > > cumbersome, or I'm not understanding exactly what's being fixed. 
> > > If you can accelerate evaluation, why not just integrate the
> > > faster math into numpy, rather than having two packages?  Or is
> > > this something that is only an advantage when the expression is
> > > given as a string (and why is that the case)?  It would be
> > > helpful if you could put the answer on your web page and in your
> > > standard release blurb in some compact form. I guess what I'm
> > > really looking for when I read one of those is a quick answer to
> > > the question "should I look into this?".
> >
> > Well, there is a link in the project page to the "Overview" section
> > of the wiki, but perhaps is a bit hidden.  I've added some blurb as
> > you suggested in the main page an another link to the "Overview"
> > wiki page. Hope that, by reading the new blurb, you can see why it
> > accelerates expression evaluation with regard to NumPy.  If not,
> > tell me and will try to come with something more comprehensible.
>
> I did see the overview.  The addition you made is great but it's so
> far down that many won't get to it.  Even in its section, the meat of
> it is below three paragraphs that most users won't care about and
> many won't understand.  I've posted some notes on writing intros in
> Developer_Zone.
>
> In the following, I've reordered the page to address the questions of
> potential users first, edited it a bit, and fixed the example to
> conform to our doc standards (and 128->256; hope that was right). 
> See what you think...
[clip]

That's great!  I've heavily changed the docs on the project site.  I've 
followed your advices in most of places, but not always (a `Building` 
section has to be always high on a manual, IMHO).

Thanks a lot for your contribution!

-- 
Francesc Alted