Python advocacy in scientific computation

[Andy Salnikov]

"Michael Tobis" <mtobis at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:1141837339.598657.177260 at j52g2000cwj.googlegroups.com...
>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
>

  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. Anyway, to do something useful you need
to use all popen() stuff, and this is indeed infinitely complex
compared to the easy shell syntax.

  Andy.