Lorenzo Isella wrote: > Dear All, > I have just noticed the existence of a Debian/Ubuntu packages for > Dolfin and I decided that I would like to give it a try. > I have a few questions, which are not intended to give rise to a flame-war. > 1)Can I use Dolfin as an almost complete replacement of commercial fem > packages like e.g. Comsol Multyphyisics?
That depends on what you mean. DOLFIN is a library, not a point-and-click application so it's different. > 2)Is it correct that if I "just" want to focus on getting equations > solved, I should mainly concentrate upon Dolfin and I can bypass for > now the other bits of the Fenics project? If not, I think I am in the > wrong list. Yes, you can ignore the other packages and just work through DOLFIN (but DOLFIN will use the other packages). > 3)My background is in functional programming and I am mainly > experienced in Fortran, R, some Python and with a rather superficial > knowledge of C and C++. > I thought, after browsing through the tutorial > (http://www.fenics.org/wiki/Tutorial), that I would be nice to use the > Python interface to Dolfin (it could make life significantly easier > for me than using a low-level language I know rather little of). DOLFIN has quite a high-level C++ interface that is very similar to the Python interface. > However, Dolfin tutorial > (http://www.fenics.org/pub/documents/dolfin/dolfin-user-manual/dolfin-user-manual.pdf), > seems to discuss everything in terms of C++. Yes, the user manual only discusses the C++ interface. This has 2 reasons: 1. The Python interface (in its current form) is pretty new (a couple of weeks old). 2. Writing documentation is not as fun as writing code. > I appreciate that for > many on this list it is probably trivial to migrate any C++ example > into e.g. Python, but that is not the case for me. Where can I find > anything similar but targeted to a Python rather than a C++ user? > This insistence on Python is due to its being more high level and the > Poisson example as a Python script looks way shorter to code than its > C++ counterpart. The documentation will appear in time, but I can't say when. Feel free to ask questions, either here or on the wiki (FAQ). /Anders > I would have plenty of other questions, but these are to me the > fundamental points right now. > Many thanks for any answers/suggestions > > Lorenzo > _______________________________________________ > DOLFIN-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.fenics.org/mailman/listinfo/dolfin-dev _______________________________________________ DOLFIN-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.fenics.org/mailman/listinfo/dolfin-dev
