[SciPy-Dev] Consensus on the future of integrate.ode

[boyfarrell at gmail.com]

Hello Juan Luis,

Yes, I saw your pull request and this, in part, motivated me to start this discussion. Looks like you put a lot of work into your odeint modifications!

I completely agree with you, that ode should be fixed first, then odeint should be a nice interface wrapped around it. integrate.ode becomes a package aimed at people who understand the complexities of solving ODE problems and integrate.odeint is for people who just want an answer.

Also, thank you for doing a nice summary, that was really helpful.

Remark 1: Backend.

I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel, Benny's work looks excellent so I think it make sense to base a new integrate.ode off scikits.odes. It has a nice array of modern solvers, in both C and Fortran.

Remark 2 Frontend.

We can define a new integrate.ode interface that wraps scikits.odes. It seems that you already have some ideas in that area, mentioning the MATLAB style. I looked at the MATLAB docs just now and spend 20 minutes thinking how this might look if it were more pythonic. You can take a look here, fork your own version to make changes or add comments,

https://gist.github.com/danieljfarrell/6482713

Best wishes,

Dan