VMD-L Mailing List

From: Lars Bruno Hansen (lhansen_at_fysik.dtu.dk)
Date: Fri Oct 29 2004 - 02:05:38 CDT

Hi Justin,

>There are still a number of issues to be worked out before VMD could
>be made act like a well-behaved Python module. I'm not quite sure
>what you had in mind for how VMD would be controlled from Python:
>would you simply have Python pass Tcl commands as strings to vmd and
>get the result back?
>
Yes, that should be at the lowest level, on top of this one could implement
the full tcl functionality but now in python, i.e the python user would not
see the tcl. Probably I have overlooked something, I am not into the tcl
script language to see if this could be done in a reasonable way,
and the python callback which are really usefull would be tricky also.

> One could do this, but it wouldn't really be any
>more useful that just starting VMD as a sepate process and
>communicating with it over sockets; i.e. there's really no VMD Python
>interface at all in that world. Don't get me wrong, this approach is
>sufficient for things like controlling VMD from a web page, but you
>then have to learn the Tcl interface anyway.
>
>
>
>

with best regards
Lars