> I think I will give XPP a try. The syntax does not look complicated. One > of the first things I will try is to write some Python routines to read > the XPP output to plot it within Matplotlib. Maybe in a long run, I > could try to include some XPP in Sage. Rob, would it be possible to > implement your PyDSTool package in Sage?
PyDSTool is a large, independent package for studying dynamical systems. It has many more features (including many of XPP's) and much larger in scope than pydde, pydelay, or scipy.integrate.odeint. As time goes on maybe there are parts of it that could be borrowed but to me it's like suggesting the merger of matlab and maple. They just have different goals and approaches. PyDSTool also includes a more flexible interface to AUTO than XPP-AUT. So if you want to do serious bifurcation analysis this is about the easiest and most XPP-like > I guess an XPPAUT wrapper and having xppaut included in sage is first prize. As a long-time user of XPP and python I disagree strongly. I don't think wrapping that software would be a smart way to proceed for Sage. XPP is primarily a GUI-controlled program, with a script to define a model and a parameters file. It's great for hands-on interactive work. XPP does not have a CLI and can only be configured by script. It only has limited data output capability in that batch mode. I once wrote a matlab-XPP interface program that can help to control it from matlab, but you would be shooting yourself in the foot after a lot of work. There are much more appropriate ways to solve DEs and do bifurcation analysis through python, as I and the other poster pointed out. Regarding another poster's comment about XPP: Of all the things to criticise, I think the complaint that XPP looks and acts old because of its X11 Tk/tcl style interface is a bit bizarre! I don't have any trouble working with it. Many, many students and faculty still pick it up and use it, especially if they don't want to get too bogged down in programming. But I agree that if you want to invest your time wisely for the future, and you are willing to learn a proper programming language, a python-based approach is the way to go. -Rob -- To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-support URL: http://www.sagemath.org
