Admiration

[Tim Roberts]

I never cease to be amazed by how quickly ideas become reality using
Python.

I needed a quick way to alter the DPI in a Windows bitmap header.  Just a
few minutes later, with judicious use of mmapfile, I had a Python script to
do so.  With a few more minutes work, this turned into a generic BMP
handler.

Later, when I needed a quick way to extract subsections of a full bitmap
into separate BMP files, I was able to build on that original work and
produce a script in a few more minutes.

After building up several such tools, I eventually needed a way to automate
their use over several thousand BMP files.  By "import"ing the original
tools, I had such a wrapper with little difficulty.

I don't normally think of a scripting tool for binary file manipulations
such as these, but Python doesn't even break a sweat.  These are tasks I
would not even have considered in Perl, because I couldn't have predicted
its behavior.

Yes, I am a Python believer.
--
- Tim Roberts, timr at probo.com
  Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.