Re: [Numpy-discussion] Release of SciPy Core 0.4 (Beta)

[Tim C. <tc...@op...>]

Chris Barker wrote:
>> Tim Churches wrote:
>>
>>>  missing values are
>>> ubiquitous in the biological sciences and any package which can't handle
>>> them isn't, to put it bluntly, of much use.
> 
> 
> MA is great, but I wonder if many of the simple "missing value" use
> cases could be covered by robust handling of NaNs.

Most.

> Which brings up the question: How does scipy_core handle NaN and the
> other IEEE special values? This was a major weakness in Numeric for me.

MA is indeed very flexible, well-designed and easy to use, but its
weakness is that it is slow - necessarily so due to its "add-on" design
- every operation is at least twice as slow as the equivalent oepration
on a Numeric array. The mask arrays also eat some additional memory,
which is sometimes an issue (untill everyone moves to 64 bit systems).

Tim C