Python advocacy in scientific computation

[Michael Tobis]

I think I agree with Steve here.

I suspect you should either have sufficiently trained your users in
Python, or have limited them to one-line statements which you could
then strip of leading whitespace before passing them to Python, or even
offered the alternative of one or the other. This would not have been
much extra work.

As for shell scripts generating Python code, I am not sure what you
were trying to do, but if you're going that far why not just replace
the shell script with a python script altogether?

os.system() is your friend.

I also agree with Steve that I can't see what this has to do with
makefiles. (But then I think "make" is a thoroughly bad idea in the
first place, and think os.system() is my friend.)

mt