[SciPy-dev] Moving random.py

[Gary Ruben]

I don't know if this is a stupid idea, but if the vote if for the magic 
to be moved to ipython, perhaps you could create a subpackage whose sole 
purpose was provide access to all subpackages in one hit a'la
from scipy.interactive import *

Gary R.

Travis Oliphant wrote:
> Hey Robert.
> 
> I temporariliy moved random back under basic for now.  I did this 
> because it's really important to me that rand, randn, fft, and ifft are 
> in the scipy namespace.   I don't want you to think I'm unsupportive of 
> the general changes you are trying to see, though.
> 
> While in principle it would be nice to not do any import magic.  There 
> are three problems that I'd like to see solved that I think the import 
> magic is trying to accomplish:
> 
> 1) making some names visible in the scipy namespace (like fft, rand, etc.)
> 2) having some mechanism for scipy_core to use the tools in full scipy 
> should it be installed (like svd, for example).
> 3) having some means to speed up importing. 
> 
> I think that there are two views of how scipy should behave that need to 
> be resolved.
> 
> The first view is where scipy is at right now in that when the user 
> imports scipy the whole kit-and-kaboodle gets imported at the same 
> time.  This view was developed back when it was envisoned that scipy 
> alone would be the MATLAB-like replacement.  I think it is more clear 
> now that IPython is better for interactive work and Matplotlib (and 
> Enthought's coming tools) are better for plotting, that something else 
> should provide the "environment for computing" besides  the simple 
> command import scipy.
> 
> The second view is that scipy should just be a simple name-space package 
> and not try to do any magic.  Users will primarily use scipy for writing 
> code and will import the needed functions from the right places. 
> 
> Most of what scipy is has been done to support interactive work, so that 
> one does not have to do:
> 
> import scipy
> import scipy.integrate
> import scipy.special
> 
> in order to get access to the sub-packages.  Perhaps this should be 
> re-thought and something like this magic moved to IPython.
> 
> -Travis