tailieunhanh - Python Scripting for Computational Science

The primary purpose of this book is to help scientists and engineers working intensively with computers to become more productive, have more fun, and increase the reliability of their investigations. Scripting in the Python programming language can be a key tool for reaching these goals [27,29]. The term scripting means different things to different people. By scripting I mean developing programs of an administering nature, mostly to organize your work, using languages where the abstraction level is higher and programming is more convenient than in Fortran, C, C++, or Java. Perl, Python, Ruby. | Python Scripting for Computational Science Hans Petter Langtangen Simula Research Laboratory and Department of Informatics University of Oslo IV Preface The primary purpose of this book is to help scientists and engineers working intensively with computers to become more productive have more fun and increase the reliability of their investigations. Scripting in the Python programming language can be a key tool for reaching these goals 27 29 . The term scripting means different things to different people. By scripting I mean developing programs of an administering nature mostly to organize your work using languages where the abstraction level is higher and programming is more convenient than in Fortran C C or Java. Perl Python Ruby Scheme and Tcl are examples of languages supporting such high-level programming or scripting. To some extent Matlab and similar scientific computing environments also fall into this category but these environments are mainly used for computing and visualization with built-in tools while scripting aims at gluing a range of different tools for computing visualization data analysis file directory management user interfaces and Internet communication. So although Matlab is perhaps the scripting language of choice in computational science today my use of the term scripting goes beyond typical Matlab scripts. Python stands out as the language of choice for scripting in computational science because of its very clean syntax rich modularization features good support for numerical computing and rapidly growing popularity. What Scripting is About. The simplest application of scripting is to write short programs scripts that automate manual interaction with the computer. That is scripts often glue stand-alone applications and operating system commands. A primary example is automating simulation and visualization from an effective user interface the script extracts information and generates input files for a simulation program runs the program .