On Thursday, 18 February 2016 17:59:59 UTC+2, William Ray Wing wrote: > > On Feb 18, 2016, at 10:33 AM, wrong.addres...@gmail.com wrote: > > > > torstai 18. helmikuuta 2016 17.21.32 UTC+2 Oscar Benjamin kirjoitti: > >> On 18 February 2016 at 11:32, Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> > > [byte] > > >> It sounds to me as if all of your needs can be solved in pure Python > >> code possibly using some of the popular extension modules from PyPI. > >> In this case it's actually very easy to package/install. You can > >> package your code simply by zipping it up with a __main__.py file. > >> Someone who wants to install it will simply have a two step process: > >> first install Python (and possibly a few dependencies) and then obtain > >> the zip file with your code in it. > >> > >> -- > >> Oscar > > > > This form of packing is not desirable. I can't ask other people to install > > Python on their machines, and I also would not want show most of the code > > doing the calculations. > > > > Now things get tricky. I can understand you not wanting to force people to > pre-install Python in order for your code to run, but just how deeply do you > want to hide or obfuscate it?
I don't have to hide it very carefully. If it creates machine code which can be decompiled, I am not very bothered, but I do not want to show many of the equations I will embed in the code, very openly. These will be different for different people, so nobody will have much motivation to break open the code. One *.exe is likely to be used by 2 or 3 people, and then for someone else, I would create another very similar *.exe with somewhat different equations. This is just one of the things I intend to do. Then there are several calculation and plotting routines for my work, which won't be given to anyone, where the issue of secrecy does not arise. > Is this potentially a commercial application to be sold, or are you simply > trying to keep things clean and tidy within various divisions of your > company. I'd hope not the former, because even VB can get you into tricky > licensing issues (and in any case - even fully compiled code in any language > these days can be de-compiled into logically correct source code, although > with less than obvious variable names). Decompiling machine code I am not at all worried about. The decompiled code will be too messy for people to study. (I won't be writing simple algebraic equations in one or two lines.) > At the other extreme, there are packaging programs (py2exe comes to mind, > although I have no experience with it). These wrap the whole python > interpreter, your code, and any needed libraries into an executable > (clickable) package. Their only downside is that the output packages they > produce tend to be large. However, any sophisticated user who digs into them > WILL be able to find your source code, possibly only slightly obfuscated by > being zipped. > This is not good if the source code with actual variable names becomes visible. Then I would have to use misleading variable names, and call temperature a flow rate, and pressure a magnetic field; stuff a lot of matrix equations which do nothing but get the decoders to waste a huge amount of time. > > Another question I have is regarding reading numerical data from text > > files. Is it necessary to read one character at a time, or can one read > > like in Fortran and Basic (something like Input #5, X1, X2, X3)? > > Python can read lines of text or whole blocks of text from source files. If > those files are in more or less well-understood form (csv for example) it has > libraries specifically designed for reading and extracting data from them > (including VERY nice facilities for doing arithmetic and otherwise > manipulating time and date data). > That is good. VB.net also has, but in the beginning I got the impression that you could read only one character as a time in a stream. > Bill > > > -- > > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
