PYTHON

The Pythonidae, commonly known simply as pythons, from the Greek word python-πυθων, are a family of non-venomous snakes found in Africa, Asia and Australia. Among its members are some of the largest snakes in the world. Eight genera and 26 species are currently recognized. (long live Wikipedia)

Nice ...

Well this is not about that beautiful snake. It's about the Python programing language my new passion. Beside other languages I currently use at work or at home I'm starting to love this simple yet powerful interpreted language.

You can find it here together with more information.

What I like about it is the portability (there are implementations for Windows, Linux/Unix, Mac OS X, Symbian[mobile phones]) and the speed to develop small applications. No need for big development environments, for compiling etc. Just RUN.

If you are lazy to write it into a text file you can just type it into the command interpreter. That's about the bold interpreted word above.

I don't want to write about the language itself - you can find nice tutorials and Hello World apps on the net. I want to write about some modules I found useful.

The easiest way to install modules is using the setuptools utility. You should download the binary package for Windows or the sources for Linux if the distribution doesn't have it already.
Then you will have the easy_install.exe program in the Pythonxy\Scripts directory.

First, to enhance productivity, there is the IPython interactive computing environment.

To install: First easy_install pyreadline then easy_install ipython

Or you can get the binary distribution from the Download page, but you will need the pyreadline module too. This nice package will give you some help in the command line interface, like tab completion (linux/unix like), history, colors, etc.



to be continued ...