complicated

[Lee Harr]

> My problem is the following: I have to create a GUI in win2k. For this, I
> thought Python
> would come in handy. And from what i've read (wxwindows and all), this
> should
> be quite straightforward. The user input will define a set of design
> parameters and
> design boundaries (for those interested, the design is a wing).
>
> Now comes the tricky part. Please read on :). The actual parametric design
> description
> resides in the ICAD Design Language (IDL), which is a superset of Allegro
> Common Lisp
> (ACL), running as a sub-process (or whatever it is called it i'm not sure)
> in Emacs.
>
> I would like to be able to instantiate a specific design from Python, i.e.
> feed parameters
> from Python to ACL and possibly running some analysis in IDL after which
> some
> response concerning the design is fed back to Python, after which Python
> decides to
> instantiate a new design, etc. etc.
>
> I would like to avoid starting up and closing down ICAD for each
> instantiation from
> Python, though it is the only way I can think of.
>


This sounds more like an ICAD question than a python question. For instance,
how would you do the same thing from say C, C++, perl, or VB?

My recommendation is to break it down in to smaller pieces until you can
get a handle on exactly what it is that you need to do. You may want to
look in the ICAD documentation (or even generally) for "interprocess
communincation" or IPC or xml-rpc.