Assignment from a list is slow in Numarray

Hello,

I am new to the list, sorry if you've been through this before.

I am trying to do some FEM computations using Petsc, to which I have
written Python bindings using Swig.  That involves passing arrays
around, which I found delightfully simple with
NA_{Input,Output,Io}Array.  Numeric seems more difficult for output
and bidirectional arrays.

My code for reading a triangulation from a file went roughly
like this:

coord = zeros( (n_vertices, 2), Float)
for v in n_vertices:
    coord[ v, :] = [float( s) for s in file.readline().split()]

This was taking quite a bit of time with ~50000 vertices and ~100000
elements, for which three integers per element are read in a similar
manner.  I found it was faster to loop explicitly:

coord = zeros( (n_vertices, 2), Float)
for v in n_vertices:
    for j, c in enumerate( [float( s) for s in file.readline().split()]):
        coord[ v, j] = c

Morally this uglier code with an explicit loop should not be faster
but it is with Numarray.  With Numeric assignment from a list has
reasonable performance.  How can it be improved for Numarray?

-- 
        Timo Korvola            <URL:http://www.iki.fi/tkorvola>


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