[SciPy-dev] ANN: Release of NumPy 0.9.2

[Travis Oliphant]

Numpy 0.9.2  is the successor to both Numeric and Numarray and builds 
and uses code from both.  This release marks the first release using the 
new (but historical) Numpy name. 

The release notes are included below:

Best regards,

-Travis Oliphant



Release Notes
==================

NumPy 0.9.2 marks the first release of the new array package under its
new name.  This new name should reflect that the new package is a
hybrid of the Numeric and Numarray packages.  This release adds many
more features and speed-enhancements from Numarray.

Changes from (SciPy Core) 0.8.4:

- Namespace and Python package name is now "numpy" and "numpy" instead
of "scipy" and "scipy_core" respectively.  This should help packagers
and egg-builders.

- The NumPy arrayobject now both exports and consumes the full
array_descr protocol (including field information).

- Removed NOTSWAPPED flag.  The byteswapping information is handled by
the data-type descriptor.

- The faster sorting functions were brought over from numarray leading
to a factor of 2-3 speed increase in sorting.   Also changed .sort()
method to be in-place like numarray and lists.

- Polynomial division has been fixed.

- basic.fft, basic.linalg, basic.random have been moved to dft,
linalg, and random respectively (no extra basic sub-package layer).

- Introduced numpy.dual to allow calling of functions that are both in
SciPy and NumPy when it is desired to use the SciPy function if the
user has it but otherwise use the NumPy function.

- The "rtype" keyword used in a couple of places has been changed to
"dtype" for consistency.

- Fixes so that the standard array constructor can be used to
construct record-arrays with fields.

- Changed method .toscalar() to .item() (added to convertcode.py)

- Added numpy.lib.mlab to be fully compatible with old MLab including
the addition of a kaiser window even when full SciPy is not
installed.

- Arrays of nested records should behave better.

- Fixed masked arrays buglets.

- Added code so that strings can be converted to numbers using
.astype()

- Added a lexsort (lexigraphic) function so that sorting on multiple
keys can be done -- very useful for record-arrays

- Speed ups and bug-fixes for 1-d "fancy" indexing by going through
the flattened array iterator when possible.

- Added the ability to add docstrings to builtin objects
"on-the-fly".  Allows adding docstrings without re-compiling C-code.

- Moved the weave subpackage to SciPy.

- Changed the fields attribute of the dtypedescr object to return a
"read-only" dictionary when accessed from Python.

- Added a typeNA dictionary for the numarray types and added a compare
function for dtypedescr objects so that equivalent types can be detected.



Please not that all modules are imported using lower-case letters (so
don't let the NumPy marketing name confuse you, the package to import
is "numpy").