15.5 The Numeric Package
The main
module in the Numeric package is the
Numeric module, which provides the
array object type, a set of functions that
manipulate these objects, and universal functions that operate on
arrays and other sequences. The Numeric package
also supports a variety of optional modules for things like linear
algebra, random numbers, masked arrays, and Fast Fourier
Transforms.
Numeric is one of the rare Python packages often
used with the idiom from
Numeric import
*. You can also use import
Numeric and qualify each name by preceding it with
Numeric. However, if you need many of the
package's names, importing all the names at once is
handy. Another popular alternative is to import
Numeric with a shorter name (e.g.,
import Numeric
as N) and qualify each name by
preceding it with N.
Although quite solid and stable, Numeric is under
continuous development, with functionality being added and
limitations removed. This chapter describes specifically
Numeric Version 21.3, the latest released version
at the time of this writing. A successor to
Numeric, named numarray, is
being developed by the Numeric community, and is
not quite ready for production use yet. numarray
is not totally compatible with Numeric, but shares
most of Numeric's functionality
and enriches it further. Information on numarray
is available at http://stsdas.stsci.edu/numarray/.
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