[Edu-sig] Why choose Python (subtitled: the lure of the tool)
David Boddie
david at boddie.org.uk
Fri Oct 21 02:03:23 CEST 2005
On Thu Oct 20 18:23:28, Peter Bowyer wrote:
[IDE features]
> I really appreciate having an inspector window to show me the values
> of variables, either all of them or ones I've asked it specifically
> to watch. This saves me from having to put in print statements or
> (at the interactive shell) to keep typing the variable names to see
> what happened after the last equation was executed.
>
> I'll think about the rest, there have been other things. I like an
> integrated searchable manual for a number of reasons.
It would be good to have a decent general IDE to use as a platform on which
to add more specialized features. I imagine that most IDEs have some kind of
plugin architecture to allow this.
> > http://rlabplus.sourceforge.net/
>
> There seem to be a lot of these around, Scilab and Octave just to
> mention two others. This always annoyed us, as one professor would
> make us use Scilab while another used a very old version of Matlab
> (not teaching the syntax for either). It's one reason I support a
> one tool fits all situation.
Yes, it may be difficult to justify choosing any given Matlab-like
environment over the others.
> >In an ideal world, I'd have used an ODE solver from Python.
>
> How about scipy.integrate.odeint :)
That would probably have done the trick, but I can't remember if that was
available at the time.
David
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