Python advocacy in scientific computation  Michael Tobis mtobis
at Mon Mar 6 05:17:41 CET 2006  1) indentation:  I claim that
this is a trivial matter. Indentation is enforced, but if you
want to end all your blocks with #end, feel free.  Or write a
preprocessor to go from your preferred block style to  2)
self.something tedious to look at.  Again, you can somewhat work
around this if you like. Just use "s" or "_" instead of "self".
3) missing  4) multithreading and parallel execution impossible
This is simply false, though admittedly the MPI libraries need a
little work. Mike Steder of our group is likely to release an
alternative. A good way to think of Python is as a powerful
extension to C. So using MPI from Python just amounts to setting
up a communicator in C and wrapping the MPI calls.  As for less
tightly coupled threads on a single processor, Python is adept
at it. I think the issues with multiple processors are much more
those of a server farm than those of a computational cluster.
We have been e