[SciPy-user] Interactive versus batch mode

Francis Burton F.L.Burton at udcf.gla.ac.uk
Fri Aug 16 06:08:59 CDT 2002

At 10:05 16/08/02 +0200, Nils Wagner <nwagner at mecha.uni-stuttgart.de> wrote:
>As far as I know the features of plt are only useful in an interactive

This raises (in my mind) a general point. It would be
extremely useful if there was a "standard", flexible
way for Python programs to call on the services of
independent, external processes for plotting, getting
input, or any other kind of processing for that matter.

The "Systems Biology Workbench" looks very promising
(and is not limited in scope to biological fields).
There is a Python API, in addition to C, C++, Java
and Delphi/Kylix APIs.
See: http://www.sbw-sbml.org/sbw/docs/index.html

With a more general architecture is Glish, "a user-level
software bus for loosely-couple distributed systems".
It is "an interpreted language for building distributed
systems from modular, event-oriented programs. These
programs are written in conventional languages such as
C, C++, or FORTRAN. Glish scripts can create local and
remote processes and control their communication. Glish
also provides a full, array-oriented programming language
for manipulating binary data sent between processes. ...".
That last bit sounds like rather like SciPy, doesn't it?!
It would be nice if Python/SciPy could provide the same
kind of communication mechanisms. Unfortunately, while
Glish is freely available, it is heavily C++ biased and
runs only on some Unix systems. In theory, something
similar could be implemented on a much wider range of
platforms using sockets.
See: http://www.cv.nrao.edu/glish/papers/


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