Pari Python

[Robert Kern]

Anton Mellit wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am working on a Pari-Python module (see about GP/PARI at
> http://pari.math.u-bordeaux.fr/). Similar project was started by
> Stefane Fermigier 12 years ago (you can find a post about it on this
> newsgroup). You can see some screenshots on my blog (http://
> mellit.wordpress.com/2007/10/28/pari-python/). I reproduce the text on
> my blog here.
> 
> I finished some working version of the pari-python module. I tried to
> make it is close as possible to the standard PARI shell, at the same
> time using the standard python syntax. Here I put some screenshots. I
> didn’t make a proper package distribution for python (the code still
> looks ugly and I still don't know how to make proper distributions),
> but if someone is interested to test it send me an email. This is in
> early alpha stage. A lot of things are not working. I imported almost
> all functions of gp by an automated perl script but I don’t know which
> of them actually work and which not.
> 
> There are two special difficulties you may notice about python. The
> first one is the power operation. In python it is ‘**’, whereas ‘^’ is
> reserved for the bitwise xor. I made some little changes to the python
> source so that ‘^’ and ‘^=’ now work as power, and ‘^^’ and ‘^^=’ work
> as xor if you still want to use it. This is done by modifying about 30
> lines of source code in several files: Include/token.h, Modules/
> parsermodule.c, Parser/tokenizer.c, Python/ast.c, Grammar/Grammar.
> 
> The second difficulty is that expressions like ‘1/2′ produce 0 in
> python. For this my module installs my own handler for the operation
> ‘divide’ for integers and longs. That’s it. In other respects it is a
> normal python module.
> 
> I will greatly appreciate any feedback.

Have you looked at SAGE at all? They already have wrappers for Pari.

  http://www.sagemath.org/

I don't recommend continuing to modify core parts of Python just for your
module. It means that you will break other Python modules. If you can't use
other Python modules with your module, what's the point of using Python at all?

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco