[SciPy-dev] [Numpy-discussion] Records in scipy core

[Andrew Straw]

Perry Greenfield wrote:

>Travis Oliphant wrote:
>  
>
>>Question:  How important is backwards compatibility with old numarray 
>>specification.  In particular, I would go with the .fields access 
>>described by Perry, and eliminate the .field() approach?
>>
>>    
>>
>For us, probably not critical since we have to do some rewriting anyway.
>(But it would be nice to retain for a while as deprecated).
>
>But what about field names that don't map well to attributes?
>I haven't had a chance to reread the past emails but I seem to
>recall this was a significant issue. That would imply that .field()
>would be needed for those cases anyway.
>  
>
I haven't read the above thread extensively, but the issue of field
names that don't map well to attributes is significant. For example,
users of pytables often have columns with names that are not valid
Python names.  So, regardless of what solution is the most obvious,
there should at least be a way to get as such field names.  (pytables
users are used to doing that.)

Cheers!
Andrew