[Radiance-general] python

[Jack de Valpine]

Hi,

I think that for most types of Radiance automation/scripting, I would 
suggest the following:

    * make - for automating basic repetitive tasks including calls to
      rad or other radiance programs
    * perl or python - offer robust programming capabilities. Both are
      quiet industrial strength, although I have been a perl person for
      a long time, my impression is that coding in python is perhaps a
      bit cleaner (shocked gasps from those who know me...)

This being said, a few comments on the following:

    * bash/csh - if you end up needing to reference/modify any of the
      scripts that are included with the Radiance distribution then you
      will need to get some understanding of these scripting languages
    * bc/awk/sed - it has been a long time since I have had to deal with
      any of these, I would suggest that it would be easier to do in
      perl/python

Regards,

-Jack

-- 
# Jack de Valpine
# president
#
# visarc incorporated
# http://www.visarc.com
#
# channeling technology for superior design and construction



Thomas Bleicher wrote:
> 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
>
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