After using numeric for almost ten years, I decided to attempt to switch a large codebase (python and C++) to using numpy. Here's are some comments about how that went.
- The code to automatically switch python stuff over just kind of works. But it was a 90% solution, I could do the rest by hand. Of course, the problem is that then the code is still using the old numeric API, so it's not a long term solution. Unfortunately, to switch to the numpy API one needs documentation, which is a problem; see below. - Well, ok, the automatic switching code doesn't really work all that well... my uses of RandomArray still work, but they generate different numbers. The underlying random-number generator must have changed. I'm sure that it's "better" now, but it's different. This is a major pain for my regression tests that rely on seeding the random number generator and getting particular results. But that's ok, I can update the regressions for the new RNG. - My extension modules just won't build because the new numpy stuff lives in a different location from where Numeric used to live. I probably could fix this, but without the documentation I can't figure out how to do that. I'd also need to figure out how to port my code to use the new numpy API instead of the compatibility layer, but I can't do that without docs either. - I guess I should just buy the documentation. I don't like this idea, because I think it's counter-productive to the project to have payware docs (would Python be successful if you had to buy the documentation? I don't think so), but that's the way this project goes. I'm doubly unhappy about it because they payment system is using Paypal and I don't like Paypal at all, but I guess that's just the way it goes. Oh, wait, I *can't* buy the docs because I'm not in the US and the payment page requires a US address. I give up; I guess NumPy is only for people living in the US. I guess I'll come back to NumPy in 2010, when the docs are available. -greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
