How to get all the variables in a python shell

[caca at mailinator.com]

  Have you seen this page?
    http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/screenshots.html
  On watching this, I wouldn't say matplotlib is inferior to matlab
plotting. Also, I don't know what they use in sage, but they have 3D
plots of surfaces that you can rotate with the mouse.
  Do as you like, but if you want to "intergrate as many exsiting
computation libraries as possible" you may end up doing something too
similar to sage. I wouldn't want to go on such a trip alone, so even
if sage is not exactly what I would do, I will probably work with
them. Their client-server approach should make it easy to work on a
cool interface without messing too much with their code. It's true,
you'll have to carry with you a lot of symbolic computation tools that
may be you don't need as an engineer, but is it that important? The
client-server approach has other advantages: if you have a very
lightweight computer (like EEE), you can place the server at home and
the lightweight computer is enough to have a full scientific
environment outdoors. And yes, I'm pretty sure you can call any
library from within sage the same way you'd do it from python.
 Regards
Pablo