Python advocacy in scientific computation

[Greg Ewing]

Andy Salnikov wrote:

> Actually os.system() is rather poor replacement for the shell's
> capabilities, and it's _very_ low level, it's really a C-level code
> wrapped in Python syntax.

Since os.system() spawns a shell to execute the command,
it's theoretically capable of anything that the shell
can do. It's somewhat inelegant having to concatenate
all the arguments into a string, though.

I gather there's a new subprocess management module
coming that's designed to clean up the mess surrounding
all the popen() variants. Hopefully it will make this
sort of thing a lot easier.

-- 
Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept,
University of Canterbury,	
Christchurch, New Zealand
http://www.cosc.canterbury.ac.nz/~greg