Re: [Numpy-discussion] Things to address for Py3K

[Charles R H. <cha...@gm...>]

On 10/11/06, Travis Oliphant <oli...@ee...> wrote:
>
>
> Hi all,
>
> Py3K is undergoing active development.  This gives us an opportunity to
> discuss more significant changes to the language that might improve the
> experience of NumPy users.
>
> We should form a list and start commenting on the py3k mailing lists
> about what changes would be most  helpful for our community.
>
> Please provide examples of changes to Python that you think might help us.
>
> A couple on my short list
>
> 1) Adding a *few* new infix operators.
>
>    a) an extra multiplication operator to distinguish between
> element-by-element and dot
>    b) extending 'and' and 'or' to allow element-by-element logical
> operations or adding && and ||
>
> 2) Lowering the precedence of & so that a > 8 & a < 10  works as you
> would expect.


Yes on the extra operators. No on changing the precedence of &, that would
just confuse the heck out of all us c/c++ programmers; && and || would be
good. Yes to something that improves on the buffer interface, although it is
certainly usable right now.

Speaking long term, what about data types? The basic 80 bit extended
precision float now occurs in 80, 96, and 128 bit versions depending on
alignment. So what happens when quad precision, which will probably be in
the next IEEE standard, comes down the pike and is 128 bits long? The length
of a float will no longer be sufficient to distinguish the various types.

Chuck