VMD-L Mailing List

From: Andrew Dalke (dalke_at_dalkescientific.com)
Date: Tue Sep 30 2003 - 12:19:46 CDT

John:
> The forseeable plan is retain the services of both languages.
> Tcl and Python are very different languages. Tcl serves well as an
> interactive command language, has a mature package system, and has
> clean bindings for Tk. Python is a nicer language, faster in many
> cases,
> and is becoming very popular in this field

There is another option that I first saw in PyMol. Write
a macro language on top of Python. If the text is Python
(there's a C API call for that) then it is evaluated as
Python. Otherwise the line is parsed as a shell line, so

   do this or that

gets converted to the Python code

   cmd.do("this", "or", "that")

Another variation is iPython (iPython.scipy.org),
a library for this which provides a more shell-like
behaviour and is modeled on Mathlab.

                                        Andrew
                                        dalke_at_dalkescientific.com