| Python and IDL [message #39570] |
Fri, 28 May 2004 08:38  |
Michael Wallace
Messages: 409
Registered: December 2003
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Senior Member |
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I'm probably the only person here who'd be interested in this, but I
guess I'll throw it out anyway.
I have recently started using Python and love the language. Python is
interpreted, interactive, object oriented, and has dynamic data types
and dynamic typing. From this perspective, IDL and Python are very
similar. There are even projects such as SciPy (http://www.scipy.org)
which add some scientific analysis to the language.
Python does have a couple nice benefits, namely the huge number of
modules available where there's everything from operating system
commands to networking to XML to email etc. One thing I've found myself
doing recently is writing my core analysis processing code in IDL and
then writing a Python wrapper around the particular code. For example,
in one of my programs, I use Python to automatically download files from
an FTP site and then call IDL to do the specific processing on the
files. In another program, I use Python to process command line
arguments and then call the appropriate IDL code based on the arguments.
Currently, in my Python programs I open a pipe to an IDL process and
write the IDL commands to the pipe. What I'm wondering is if there is
an efficient way to send data from IDL back to Python. The only thing
I've found so far is to have IDL write data to stdout and set up the
Python side to read this stream. However, this can get pretty
inefficient at times. Without any direct conversion between the two
languages available, are there any other (i.e. better, efficient) ways
to set up bi-directional interprocess communication between Python and IDL?
What'd be really nice is if RSI provided some mechanism for IDL and
Python to communicate at a much closer level than interprocess
communication. Karl, that's a hint. ;-)
-Mike
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