ANN: PyDSTool now compatible with numpy 1.0.1, scipy 0.5.2 and 64-bit CPUs.

[Rob Clewley]

This kind of comment comes up often, so I think it's worth spelling
out a response that will persist on the web and can appear in our FAQ.

I have a different and admittedly limited view of hybrid systems as
part of dynamical systems theory. In principle, I would love to have
time to write an interface to something like Modelica, but PyDSTool
isn't intended as an industrial-scale simulation package: it is
intended for applied dynamical systems research involving small
systems that people want to analyze with tools like bifurcation theory
and parameter estimation. I also want to switch components in and out
of a model with minimum overhead as part of model estimation and
parameter estimation routines that remain an open research area.
Partly for this reason I don't want to start depending on large
external packages, most features of which people may never be needed.
Given my present purposes the overhead of writing an interface is a
demanding sink of my time when basic (essentially prototype) tools
suffice in the short term. That is also why I am not planning a
graphical UI at this time. (The related DsTool and XPP packages
already have GUIs.)

I appreciate the idea of outsourcing to take advantage of good work in
areas such as yours.  I hope to step up to that bar later on as part
of an ongoing research project connected to me, which involves
studying the mechanisms of locomotion in insects. There are other
mechanical simulation packages that I would like to interface to (most
are commercial), but on close inspection it turns out there's a lot of
very technical issues involved -- although at least modelica is open
source! Sorry to be taking a short-term view here (I try to avoid
that), but we're just a couple of guys trying to concentrate on our
day jobs...

Rob