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<center>
<title>ScientificPython User's Guide</title>
<h1>ScientificPython User's Guide</h1>
Konrad Hinsen<br>
Centre de Biophysique Molculaire<br>
CNRS<br>
Rue Charles Sadron<br>
45071 Orlans
Cedex 2
<br>
France<br>
E-Mail: <a href="mailto:hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr">hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr</a><br>Last revision: 2001-3-29<br></center>
<a name="introduction"><h3>Introduction</h3><a>
<p>ScientificPython is a collection of Python modules that are
useful for scientific computing. Most modules are rather general,
others belong to specific domains and will be of interest to only a
small number of users (e.g. the module Scientific.IO.PDB). Almost all
modules make extensive use of Numerical Python (NumPy), which must be
installed prior to Scientific Python. Python 1.5 or later is also
required. For more information about Numerical Python and about other
packages for scientific computing, see the <a href="http://www.python.org/topics/scicomp/">Topic Guide
"Scientific Computing"</a> on the Python home page.
</p>
<p>This manual describes version 2.2 of ScientificPython. The 2.x
versions are completely revised and <i>not</i>
compatible with earlier releases. The major difference is the
introduction of a package structure; all modules are now submodules of
the top-level module Scientific. The package structure should prevent
name clashes with other modules, which have occurred in the past (e.g.
the module PDB was indistinguishable from the module pdb in the Python
standard library on operating systems without case distinction in
filenames).
</p>
<p>For most code written for versions 1.x of ScientificPython,
a change of the import statements should be all that is required to make
it compatible with this release. The only module with significantly
changed functionality is Scientific.Statistics.Histogram; the changes
were necessary to implement an algorithm that is much more efficient
for large data sets. There are of course also additional modules and
enhancements to existing ones, but they don't affect compatibility.
The most significant addition is the module Scientific.IO.NetCDF, which
was previously distributed separately.
</p>
<p>It should be noted that ScientificPython 2.x can coexist with
an 1.x version, as all module names are different. However, the
availability of both versions in parallel makes it difficult to verify
that code has been fully ported to use the new one.
</p>
<ul><li><a href="Scientific_1.html">Installation on Unix systems</a></ul>
<ul><li><a href="Scientific_2.html">Reference for Module Scientific</a></ul>
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