sam wrote: > hello all, > > i am currently in the process of planning a piece of software to model > polymerisation kinetics, and intend to use python for all the > high-level stuff. the number-crunching is something i would prefer to > do in fortran (which i have never used, but will learn), but i have no > experience of accessing non-python code from python.
I strongly recommend learning Fortran 95, rather than Fortran 77 > i am also fairly new to programming period, and am therefore tackling a > fairly serious > issue reletive to my experience. > > how easy is it to get fortran modules running from python? G95 is a good, free Fortran 95 compiler -- I use it heavily, on Windows. A discussion of "How to interface with Python programs" using numpy is at http://www.g95.org/howto.html#python . There is a numpy group http://groups.google.com/group/Numpy-discussion with a recent thread "accessing FORTRAN from Python". There is also a g95 group http://groups.google.com/group/gg95 . > if c is easier to use in this respect, i could go in that direction instead. easier to interface with Python, but not easier for writing numerical code IMO, especially if you need multidimensional arrays. <snip> > PS if numpy is adequate for this, i would be quite happy to use it. i > got the impression it was more for matrix algebra. i will be > programming a monte carlo simulation, which will need to perform a lot > (a lot!) of simple operations over and over... Fortran 95 has some of the advantages of numpy -- you perform operations on whole arrays and array sections. It would probably be considerably faster for code with loops. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
