python for EE CAD program

[Chris Mellon]

On 6/4/07, chewie54 <dfabrizio51 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jun 4, 10:58 am, "Diez B. Roggisch" <d... at nospam.web.de> wrote:
> > > Hello Diez,
> >
> > > I did look at PythonCad but the distribution and install methods for
> > > Windows is not user freindly. Since the public domain software,  I
> > > don't think they protect the source code either.
> >
> > The subject of code obfuscation in python has been beaten to death quite a
> > few times on this list, do a search to find anything you want to know.
> >
> > In a nutshell: forget about it. it's not worth it, difficult to accomplish
> > due to the dynamic nature of python and to be brutally honest: more or less
> > nothing you can come up with in your own code is really worth looking at
> > anyway. That's not saying that you can't code, just that more or less
> > everything one programs is trivial and only of value in the actual context
> > it was written in. So nobody is really interested in ripping stuff out.
> >
> > diez
>
>
> Your opinions are noted, thank you,  but I don't agree with you.
> There are
> portions of the code that are under review for patents and as such
> need to
> be protected.
>

For the record: This is not true. If you've already applied for the
patent, you have as much legal protection as you will ever get. Also,
since patents apply to methods and not to literal source, if you're
trying to protect something patentable you have even less protection
against analysis and disassembly than you would if you were trying to
protect the copyright on the code. If you need to make a token effort
to satisfy whatever legal hurdles are involved, shipping .pyc files
(which py2exe and all the other packagers I'm aware of do) is just as
effective as shipping executables compiled with C or C++.

> I'm investigating whether Python is the right language to use
> for a commercial CAD application. While I think Python is a great
> scripting
> language, there seems to limitations with regards to packaging and
> distributing
> programs.
>

None that don't also exist in every other language in existence. These
are fundamental issues of information theory, not language
constraints.