Ryan May wrote: >> I for one will be happy to change my code; numerical stuff in >> numpy, plotting stuff in pylab (or pyplot?), though some things >> like linspace() may be hard to loose; that's really an mlab >> function and I can import mlab.
I'm a big namespace fan. I'd much rather see us all do something like: import pyplot import numpy as N import mlab etc. In this case, there should be little name overlap between these modules, and you could "import *" all of them if you really wanted. However, they are not all maintained by the same folks, so some overlap may occur, and that's a good reason for keeping them in separate namespaces. In any case, it needs to be decided what the point of the mlab module is. There was a discussion about this a few (quite a few!) years ago when there was just Numeric, and it came with an mlab module (at least I think it was called mlab). At that point, we decided that Matlab compatibility wasn't really the point -- the point was that there were a number of nifty utilities in Matlab that people missed, and that the stuff in mlab wasn't completely Matlab compatible anyway (numpy and Matlab are just plain different, after all). We more or less decided to what we really needed was a "Utilities" module that could hold some of those nifty useful functions (like linspace, etc), but not much was done at the time. Since then, numpy as gained quite a bit of those features anyway. So for this mlab module -- what is the goal? 1) A Matlab-like set of tools? In that case, it way want to default to matrices, rather than arrays, etc. If that's what's wanted, I'd make it a stand-alone module, that imports what it needs from numpy, but provides a complete API. 2) A bunch of extra utilities that numpy doesn't have, but are handy. In that case, I'd have it include only the extras, and one would need to import numpy and mlab both. It could also "import *" numpy , then add the extra stuff, but I'm too much of a namespace fan to advocate for that. What happens when numpy adds a name that clashes with an mlab name, for instance? -Chris -- Christopher Barker, Ph.D. Oceanographer Emergency Response Division NOAA/NOS/OR&R (206) 526-6959 voice 7600 Sand Point Way NE (206) 526-6329 fax Seattle, WA 98115 (206) 526-6317 main reception [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Splunk Inc. Still grepping through log files to find problems? Stop. Now Search log events and configuration files using AJAX and a browser. Download your FREE copy of Splunk now >> http://get.splunk.com/ _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-devel mailing list Matplotlib-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-devel
