complicated

[Martijn van den Branden]

Hi group,

I would be very grateful if someone could give me some advice on
reading material or point me in a direction to proceed, as the information
I can find on the subject is kind of overwhelming to me. I'm not even
sure where to look.

My problem is the following: I have to create a GUI in win2k. For this, I
thought Python
would come in handy. And from what i've read (wxwindows and all), this
should
be quite straightforward. The user input will define a set of design
parameters and
design boundaries (for those interested, the design is a wing).

Now comes the tricky part. Please read on :). The actual parametric design
description
resides in the ICAD Design Language (IDL), which is a superset of Allegro
Common Lisp
(ACL), running as a sub-process (or whatever it is called it i'm not sure)
in Emacs.

I would like to be able to instantiate a specific design from Python, i.e.
feed parameters
from Python to ACL and possibly running some analysis in IDL after which
some
response concerning the design is fed back to Python, after which Python
decides to
instantiate a new design, etc. etc.

I would like to avoid starting up and closing down ICAD for each
instantiation from
Python, though it is the only way I can think of.

(Any other way would involve setting up some interface which is probably an
advanced programming problem?).

Thanks in advance for your anwers,

Martijn