On Thu Oct 20 18:23:28, Peter Bowyer wrote: [IDE features]
I really appreciate having an inspector window to show me the values of variables, either all of them or ones I've asked it specifically to watch. This saves me from having to put in print statements or (at the interactive shell) to keep typing the variable names to see what happened after the last equation was executed.
I'll think about the rest, there have been other things. I like an integrated searchable manual for a number of reasons.
It would be good to have a decent general IDE to use as a platform on which to add more specialized features. I imagine that most IDEs have some kind of plugin architecture to allow this.
There seem to be a lot of these around, Scilab and Octave just to mention two others. This always annoyed us, as one professor would make us use Scilab while another used a very old version of Matlab (not teaching the syntax for either). It's one reason I support a one tool fits all situation.
Yes, it may be difficult to justify choosing any given Matlab-like environment over the others.
In an ideal world, I'd have used an ODE solver from Python.
How about scipy.integrate.odeint :)
That would probably have done the trick, but I can't remember if that was available at the time. David