Yes; numexpr and weave are pretty reasonable solutions, although a little "weird" because they take opaque strings.
One bit of context that is missing from this discussion (although Travis did allude to it earlier) is that we are actively working on building robust deferred computation support into Numpy, and to make these run much faster than what hand-tuned C can provide, via a variety of mechanisms.
(Disclaimer: I also work with Travis at http://continuum.io, along with the author of Numexpr and PyTables. :-)
One bit of context that is missing from this discussion (although Travis did allude to it earlier) is that we are actively working on building robust deferred computation support into Numpy, and to make these run much faster than what hand-tuned C can provide, via a variety of mechanisms.
(Disclaimer: I also work with Travis at http://continuum.io, along with the author of Numexpr and PyTables. :-)