Pyrex

Pyrex (trademarked as PYREX) is a brand introduced by Corning Incorporated in 1915 for a line of clear, low-thermal-expansion borosilicate glass used for laboratory glassware and kitchenware. Pyrex sold in the United States is now made of tempered glass; outside of North America the costlier borosilicate is still used.

Corning no longer manufactures or markets PYREX-branded borosilicate glass kitchenware and bakeware in the US. World Kitchen, LLC, which was spun off from Corning in 1998, licensed the pyrex (all lower case) brand for their own line of kitchenware products—differentiated by their use of clear tempered soda-lime glass instead of borosilicate.

History

Borosilicate glass was first made by German chemist and glass technologist Otto Schott, founder of Schott AG in 1893, 22 years before Corning produced the Pyrex brand. Schott AG sold the product under the name "Duran".

In 1908, Eugene Sullivan, director of research at Corning Glass Works, developed Nonex, a borosilicate low-expansion glass, to reduce breakage in shock-resistant lantern globes and battery jars. Sullivan had learned about Schott's borosilicate glass as a doctoral student in Leipzig, Germany. Jesse Littleton of Corning discovered the cooking potential of borosilicate glass by giving his wife a casserole dish made from a cut-down Nonex battery jar. Corning removed the lead from Nonex and developed it as a consumer product. Pyrex made its public debut in 1915 during World War I, positioned as an American-produced alternative to Duran.

Pyrex (programming language)

Pyrex is a programming language developed to aid in creating Python modules. Its syntax is very close to Python. The goal is to make it easy for Python programmers to write the non-Python supporting code usually required for interfacing modules in a language which as close to Python as possible.

Python limitation

Python itself only provides a C API to write extension modules, which allows writing of functions and datatypes in C. These can then be accessed from Python. It is thus also possible to wrap the functions and datatypes of existing C libraries as Python objects and therefore make them available to Python.

Other tools

There are tools like SWIG or Python's foreign function library ctypes which can be used for this task without requiring much additional code, but this is limited to making an external library available in Python code. If adjustments to the API are needed, glue code must again be written manually. This is where Pyrex fits in.

Pyrex abilities

Pyrex allows the user to write extension modules in a Python-like language which may directly access the external C code. The similarity of Pyrex's syntax to Python's makes it easy to write Python modules, as there is no need to learn another language (such as C or C++), and there may be no need to write any glue code. All that is needed is to specify the name of C-header files, enumerations, datatypes and functions needing to be accessed in the module. Then one simply uses them as if they were Python objects. The Pyrex compiler will generate the necessary glue code automatically and compile the Pyrex code into a working Python module.