Perl to Python conversion

[Martin Schöön]

Thanks all, great response!

A little more background:

I am not a programmer but I have done some programming in the past.
This was all humble number crunching as part of my PhD project using
FORTRAN. I also did some Rocky Mountain Basic coding for programs
manipulating measurement instruments. And I did a minute amount
of Turbo Pascal code, too little and too many years ago to count.

Since then I have done some stuff in Matlab and (very basic) UNIX
scripts.

Does HTML, css and LaTeX count?

So why Python? Well, I thought it would be fun to learn a little
about GUI programming and a friend who is a real programmer recommended
Python + PyQt. I have bought some books and lurked here for about
a year but haven't managed to get going yet. I figured I needed
some kind of project for that and now I have two.

Learning Python and PyQt is spare time killer/brain teaser activity.

The thermal contact conductance stuff is something that come in
handy at work.

So here is what I plan to do based on your kind advice and some
thinking of my own.

1) I fix the unit thing by adding a conversion to the results
presentation routine.

2) Recreating the functionality of the program in Python and PyQt
will be a 'long term' educational project at home. There are
various bits and pieces there: data base handling, GUI design, math,
logic, error/exception handling...

We have long, dark winters where I live :-)

All the best,

/Martin