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To perform calculations with pDynamo, users write Python programs that employ the packages of the pDynamo library. Python is a dynamic, interactive, open-source scripting language with a very active user community. Comprehensive documentation, including tutorials, is available on the Python web site.

The best way to learn Python is to write programs. A simple example is as follows:

import math   # . Define a squaring function. def Square ( x ):
return x**2

# . Create a list of integers. values = range ( 10 )   # . Loop over the integers. for i in values:     x = float ( i )
    print "%5d%10.5f%10.5f%10.5f" % ( i, x, math.sqrt ( x ), Square ( x ) )
To run the program, the Python interpreter must be invoked. There are a number of ways to do this but one of the simplest is to open a terminal window (on Linux and MAC OS-X machines) and enter python on the command line. The program can then be typed in, taking care to respect the case of the characters and the number of spaces that appear at the beginning of each line. Blank lines can be omitted if desired, as can lines starting with the hash character (#) because these are comments. What happens when typing is finished? What does the program do?

Being able to type programs directly into the Python interpreter is very useful for trying things out and for short programs, but becomes tedious for more complicated tasks. In these cases, it is easiest to create the program in a text file and then invoke Python with the name of the text file as an argument. The above program appears in the file of the pDynamo distribution and may be run by typing python


  1. Experiment further with Python by writing some simple programs. A good place to start is to modify so that other functions, such as additional powers, of the numbers are calculated.