[SciPy-user] array vs matrix, converting code from matlab

[David Cournapeau]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> One thing...  I'm not sure why you think porting Netlab to SciPy would 
> be such a huge task.  It's a big task, sure.  Porting to C++ would 
> definitely be a huge task.
Well, the nice thing with C++ is that you can plug it directly to python 
using swig and hand-coded wrapping code. It is actually one reason why I 
want to go on python: wrapping C code for matlab is awful (there is no 
way to control the memory handler, for example), and things like swig or 
python::boost are much better (without even taking into account that C 
and python have the same convention for indexing and row major 
ordering). As the code is BSD, I think the licenses are compatible with 
scipy. I think in a summer internship, you could write good swig or 
boost::python extension to have the wrapping mostly automated.

Porting from matlab to scipy involve porting/testing all the code, 
whereas using C++ code involve mostly glue-code. But maybe I am 
underestimating the difficulty...

David