[SciPy-dev] [patch] read/write v5 .mat files with structs, cell arrays, objects, or function handles

[Jarrod Millman]

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 11:52 AM, Zachary Pincus <zachary.pincus at yale.edu> wrote:
> I'm not 100% sure what the backwards-compatibility guarantees for
> scipy are right now, but the matlab 5 IO is pretty new, so hopefully
> useful changes like these won't be a problem. (Any one can say for
> sure?)

In general, backward compatibility for SciPy isn't as big a constraint
as it is for NumPy.  NumPy is an extremely mature codebase that is
widely used by many projects, so we have to be *extremely* careful
about ABI/API breaks.

SciPy on the other hand is still considered 'beta' software, so we
should be focusing on getting it to the point that we consider it more
'production' code.  Once we get to that point we will need to start
being much more careful about ABI/API breaks.  Of course, no one is
going to want to use SciPy if we arbitrarily break their code with
every release of SciPy.  So we just need to strike a reasonable
balance of fixing and improving SciPy, while not chasing off users.

In this particular case, the changes to the mat file io looks very
reasonable.  I will let Stéfan van der Walt  or Matthew Brett make the
final call, but I would like to see this patch (or a revised version
of it) get in.

Thanks,

-- 
Jarrod Millman
Computational Infrastructure for Research Labs
10 Giannini Hall, UC Berkeley
phone: 510.643.4014
http://cirl.berkeley.edu/