Like summation? Of course you can.

Not that I think that Numpy moving into Python is going to happen, I do think that as the language is used more by statisticians, linear algebra might be a little more important, therefore some things from Numpy might be included into the base language, and thus deprecated from Numpy.

And of course you can do just about anything with an array in raw Python, but the difference between using an iterative loop with zip, and just using an operand is pretty substantial. For example, the only way to dot multiply two matrices is to use numpy’s dot function, or something similar to the iterative loop I wrote above, right?

Well in R, as you said: I could just use the * operand instead.

Less of a: Numpy needs to join the base language.

More of a: It will be interesting to see what from Numpy might make it into the base language.