# ScientificPython User's Guide

Konrad Hinsen
Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire
CNRS
Rue Charles Sadron
45071 Orléans Cedex 2
France
E-Mail: hinsen@cnrs-orleans.fr
Last revision: 2000-8-3

### Introduction

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 Topic Guide "Scientific Computing" on the Python home page.

This manual describes version 2.1 of ScientificPython. The 2.x versions are completely revised and not 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).

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.

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.

- Installation on Unix systems

- Reference for Module Scientific