On Thursday 25 August 2005 09:13 am, Peter Hansen wrote: > Terry Hancock wrote: > > On Wednesday 24 August 2005 09:12 pm, Peter Hansen wrote: > >>Or even http://www.pythoncad.org/ which, although probably for > >>mechanical CAD work (I haven't looked at it, don't really know), is > >>surely a good place to get ideas of what Python can do in this area. > > > > No, I doubt it. PythonCAD is a 2D mechanical CAD drawing system. > > I don't think it would be anywhere near what this guy wants. They're > > just different applications. He's looking for an electronic CAD system or > > EDA, I'm pretty sure (or looking to write one, rather). > > As an engineer who's worked extensively in both kinds of systems > (primarily designing microcontroller-based circuit boards), and a > programmer who's stolen useful ideas from endless amounts of other > people's code, I'll say only that I disagree with your implication that > looking at PythonCAD will give him no useful ideas whatsoever
Heh. Well I didn't use the word "whatsoever" did I. ;-) No you're right, if you're looking to write code from the ground-up, then it's certainly true that this would help. But I pointed him at Gnu EDA, because it already seems to do *most* of what he was looking for, I think. There's also PCB and zcircuit to be considered. All of these are C language programs, I believe, and he's already an experienced C/C++ programmer it would seem. OTOH, PythanCAD serves as an example of why he might be better off to *write* the CAD program in Python and use C/C++ extension modules as needed, instead of embedding Python into a C/C++ application. But I kind of got the impression he was attached to using C++ for the job, which would not be *my* choice, but is certainly preferred by a lot of programmers. There is another, community-oriented reason for writing it in Python and looking at PythonCAD, of course. It would not be unreasonable to write an EDA/PCB/autorouter application that worked IN PythonCAD. That would be pretty cool. It would also be a good way to leverage community support for the project. But I have a feeling this is not going to be the way the OP will want to go, since he came asking only how to embed Python into a C/C++ application. -- Terry Hancock ( hancock at anansispaceworks.com ) Anansi Spaceworks http://www.anansispaceworks.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
