[Matrix-SIG] re: advocacy

[Konrad Hinsen]

> 6) Weak interactive environment: It is not always appreciated by 
>    non-scientists that interactive mode is where most time is spent
>    looking at data. To that end, the interactive mode needs some conveniences

The best interactive environment for Python work is Emacs, in my
opinion. It does:

>    - command (and output) logging.

Trivial: everything is in a buffer anyway, just save it.

>    - easy system escapes (e.g., !ls in IRAF, $ls in IDL)

Requires just one keypress to get into a shell buffer.

>    - as trivial as it sounds, an intuitive exit command (like 'exit' or 'quit')

Just kill the Python buffer.

>    - an easy way of re-executing moderately long command sequences or blocks
>      without using an editor (e.g., you invoke a loop of several statements
>      repeatedly because you need to tweak some parameters each time).

Done with Ctrl-!

>    - utility functions to start up help, or examine the namespace for
>      existing data elements (much like IDL does)

That one may be missing.

There's also ptui and Guido's early release of IDLE, both worth
checking out.

> 7) Image display convenient for astronomers (either by saoimage or ximtool
>    lookalikes or connections to either of those so that images could be
>    displayed on those tools.   

PIL is good enough for me, but I am not a heavy image user.

> Hopefully the FITS issue will be solved soon--I'm eagerly looking forward to
> Paul's implementation. (And make that ~5 FITS implementations; I did a 

Just out of curiosity - could someone give a short explanation
for non-astronomers what FITS really is?

> from scratch. There a number of graphics packages out there but each
> has a shortcoming or two that makes us reluctant to use it. Our need

That seems to be the major problem; these things have been discussed
on the Plot-SIG for a while. Nothing is really good enough, and worse,
nothing available seems to be written well enough to permit easy
extension. Moreover, cross-platform portability is a big problem with
all plotting libraries, and would be a problem even with starting
from scratch.
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Konrad Hinsen                            | E-Mail: hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr
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