[SciPy-dev] [SciPy-user] Low-level code integration

[Tom Loredo]

Hi folks-

I'll be in the Bay area next week but unfortunately at another meeting, 
so I can't participate in this discussion.  But I think the thread
raises important issues.

> This, we agree 100% on.  In fact, if the C API offered a way to index high 
> rank arrays without manually computing stride offsets on every access, that 
> would probably satisfy a significant fraction of usage cases.  I consider 
> one-liners like the above icing on the cake, but A(i,j,k) indexing is really a 
> significant change which makes development far more productive.

This point of agreement between the two of you is indeed what would
satisfy me most of the time.  I write a lot of extensions with
few-d arrays, and calculating the strides does indeed become
a nuisance and makes the code harder to read and maintain.

Another possible virtue of having this kind of intermediate API
between C and numarray is that it might isolate the user to 
possible future changes in the numarray C API, though I don't
know if there is a significant chance of such changes.

Just thought I'd add a voice of agreement on the value of the
kind of API being discussed, even if I'm not in a position to
offer code....

-Tom Loredo