[PYTHON MATRIX-SIG] Integrated Simulation Environment?

[Konrad Hinsen]

> 1) I'd like to have controlled persistency.  For example, I would like
>    to have "project files" which maintain a state accross invocations,
>    including but not restricted to:
> 	- configurable all/none/chosen intermediate variables
> 	- function definitions in the interpreter
> 	- graphs of data (using PIL or OpenGL or whatever else comes
>           along)

Sounds a lot like APL workspaces... Yes, I miss those too. However,
this is hardly specific for numerical applications. It ought to be
considered for interactive use in general. Isn't there a SIG on
development environments?

My personal solution is to use Emacs as my work environment. This makes
typing into a (permanent) file and executing from it easy enough that
the lack of real interactivity hardly matters. What I would like to have
is a key combination that kills the Python buffer and starts a fresh session
with the current buffer as input, but that shouldn't be too hard...

That still doesn't take care of persistence, for which I have adopted a
standard command sequence (based on pickling, of course) that I might
one day turn into a module. Basically, it saves all relevant objects
into a file, and the next time loads this file and recalculates all
objects that were not in it.

> 2) I need "smart simulation objects", which incorporate notions like
>    labeled, unit-ful, range-ful axes, a notion of dependency between
>    objects (so that if I change the definition of "input_set", then all
>    of the relevant dependencies can be updated).

Sounds like a simple matter of a few Python classes. Go ahead...

> 3) I need graphing capabilities.  This is pretty obvious, so I'll just
>    say that if 2) above is implemented, some parts of this are easy --
>    labeling the axes in the correct units, etc., should be trivial.

Indeed, but it's still a lot of work.

> These tools are what I think will make Python have a chance when
> compared to Matlab, S+, etc.  I'll be working on them for my own good,
> but I was wondering if others were thinking along the same lines.

Definitely. My problem is just an accute lack of time. Not that I am
not doing Python programming, I am doing lots of it. But I have to
concentrate on what I need for my real job, which right now involves
doing molecular modelling in Python. Works beautifully until now, but
there remains a lot to be done...

Konrad.
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Konrad Hinsen                          | E-Mail: hinsen@ibs.ibs.fr
Laboratoire de Dynamique Moleculaire   | Tel.: +33-76.88.99.28
Institut de Biologie Structurale       | Fax:  +33-76.88.54.94
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