I have a hard time believing that NumPy is "carrying" Python to the extent you suggest. While a large number of people use Python because of NumPy, my work in

I have a hard time believing that NumPy is "carrying" Python to the extent you suggest. While a large number of people use Python because of NumPy, my work in chemical structure analysis and search doesn't depend on NumPy. I use the package about once a year, and few of the chemistry analysis tools I have a dependency on it. I used to be involved with the Biopython project, and while NumPy is strongly recommended for a couple of the modules, it's not a requirement. Then there's all the people who use it because of Django, and Zope before that. (I remember that the 2000 Python conference seemed to be half Zope developers.) Plus the win32 extensions get about 7,000 downloads per week, implying a pretty active base in that area. Checking the PyCon talks, only about 5% of them seem to deal with numeric work. (Then again, there's SciPy ... but there's also DjangoCon and local non-NumPy meetings; certainly few in our local user group meeting work with NumPy.) How then did you draw your conclusion? Python-the-language did make three changes to support the language: multi-dimensional array slicing, the Ellipsis notation, and most recently the infix operator for matrix multiplication. But I believe that any language which couldn't handle a NumPy-like module would not be that successful in the first place.