[Numpy-discussion] Home for pyhdf5io?

[David Warde-Farley]

On 23-May-09, at 4:25 PM, Albert Thuswaldner wrote:

> Actually my vision with pyhdf5io is to have hdf5 to replace numpy's
> own binary file format (.npy, npz). Pyhdf5io (or an incarnation of it)
> should be the standard (binary) way to store data in scipy/numpy. A
> bold statement, I know, but I think that it would be an improvement,
> especially for those users how are replacing Matlab with sicpy/numpy.

In that it introduces a dependency on pytables (and the hdf5 C  
library) I doubt it would be something the numpy core developers would  
be eager to adopt.

The npy and npz formats (as best I can gather) exist so that there is  
_some_ way of persisting data to disk that ships with numpy. It's not  
meant necessarily as the best way, or as an interchange format, just  
as something that works "out of the box", the code for which is  
completely contained within numpy.

It might be worth mentioning the limitations of numpy's built-in  
save(), savez() and load() in the docstrings and recommending more  
portable alternatives, though.

David