On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 9:49 AM, Jed Brown <jedbrown@mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

On Sun, Feb 10, 2013 at 8:40 AM, Matthew Knepley <knepley@gmail.com> wrote:

The phrase "may as well" is very slippery. Python arrays are just [x, y, z], whereas JSON needs a library.

However, the format is is now way crucial to the scheme. I want to get the workflow up an running with

the simplest format. We will inevitably tweak it was we add tons of crap on top if it works.

The syntax for plain arrays is identical. I was suggesting JSON to manage recursive data structures (nested solvers, perhaps monitoring different things). So it becomes a dict of arrays or a dict of dicts of arrays. Also, we could spit out -snes_view in machine-readable form, we could have nicer diagnostics on the GUI side. It is because of these extensions that I think it's worth starting with something that will extend gracefully rather than a hack that is only intended for arrays of numbers.

Don't disagree with any of your reasons, however, there is very little work wasted here. Most of the coding

is adding new methods, hooking up Python, etc. and not writing the two lines for output. Thus, adding JSON

later will be all new work, and will invalid hardly anything. This is modularity :)

Matt

--
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener