I like the thoughts on core-architecture.   These are all things that we were 
not able to do as part of the NumPy for .NET discussions, but with the right 
interested parties could be acted upon. 

> 
> I like the lower two levels if, as I assume, they are basically aimed at 
> allocating, deallocating blocks of memory (or equivalent) and doing basic 
> manipulations such as dealing with endianess and casting. Where do you see 
> array methods making an appearance?
> 
> That's correct. Currently, for example, the cast functions take array objects 
> as parameters, something that would no longer be the case.  The array methods 
> vs functions only shows up in the Python exposure, I believe.  The above 
> structure only affects the C library, and how its exposed to Python could 
> remain as it is now.

Right now, the reason the array objects are passed to the cast functions is 
because variable-sized data-types need the elsize information that comes from 
the array structure.    This could be handled differently, of course, but the 
low-levels will need some way of passing variable information like this.   For 
some data-types you know the size exactly, for others it's a parameter.  

> 
> The original Numeric only had three (IIRC) rather basic methods and 
> everything else was function based, an approach which is probably easier to 
> maintain. The extensive use of methods came from numarray and might be 
> something that could be added at a higher level so that the current ndarrays 
> would be objects combining ow level arrays and ufuncs.
>  
> Sounds reasonable to me.

I agree that the low-level objects should use a functional approach with very 
few methods.   

-Travis

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