Talk:GSOC2010/Mentor Summit notes

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Revision as of 00:03, 28 October 2010 by Jpye (talk | contribs)
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Text-only ASCEND

Some comments:

  • there is already a text-only ASCEND: one can instantiated models and solve them using Python scripting, with no GUI required.
  • the Python API is a bit troublesome, due to the use of some less-than-ideal C++ code that John Pye wrote during his PhD. It is proposed to down-convert that C++-based API to a C-based one, but still using SWIG. To some extent this rewrite would be 'grunt work' but requires some intimate knowledge of the current C code as well as SWIG.
  • Continuing to use SWIG leaves open the option of wrapping the API with other non-Python languages if a need for that arose, especially if we convert to a simpler C-based API code layer.
  • John Pye sees any change to the current METHODS implementation of basic scripting as a major change that no-one's actually prepared to work on, so proposes to leave that idea on the backburner.
  • by data table output I understand you to mean something like the current STUDY functionality. This is to some extent supported in the current Python layer, but we need some way to declare parameter ranges for simpler generation of parametric plots.
  • For file export/output, I would like to see something like the PROBE functionality added to the PyGTK GUI, so that some/all of the variables and their associated values could be exported in the form of a CSV file or similar. Note that the current Observer functionality allows tabular data to be copied/pasted into Excel/OpenOffice.
  • Plot generation could be worked on but I see it as lower priority than the STUDY feature. We need to make it easier to generate the data as a first step.
Jpye 00:03, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
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