[Radiance-general] python

[Thomas Bleicher]

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 7:09 AM, Jia Hu <hujia06 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello:
>
> In Ubuntu, I do not have much knowledge of shell programming about bash.  Is
> that a good choice to use python script to run Radiance (I did find some
> posts about using python to run Radiance programs) if I hope to run other
> numeric simulation at the same time?

If you only want to run multiple Radiance processes at the same time
or automate your calculation processes BASH may be a better choice
because it is your standard environment in Unix and so the commands
are identical on the command line and in a script. However, for anything
more complex (even as simple as floating point arithmetic) you will need
other Unix tools like bc, awk and sed which means you will have to
learn their command syntax, too.

If you plan on post-processing your results (calculate average, create plots
or summary reports) then I would recommend Python. It's a powerful
language but still easy to learn. Once you have worked out how to read
files or how to use the "subprocess" module to run Radiance commands
you can do everything you could do with BASH.

For both there are good learning resources available on the net and
they are a common choice to control Radiance simulations. So you
can't really go wrong here.


Regards,
Thomas