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Python Scientific Lecture Notes, Release 2012.3 (Euroscipy 2012)

This document discusses Python modules and how to organize code into reusable modules. It provides examples of importing common scientific computing modules like NumPy and SciPy. It warns against using wildcard imports from modules like os. Finally, it provides a brief example of defining your own module in a .py file to organize and reuse code.

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29 views1 page

Python Scientific Lecture Notes, Release 2012.3 (Euroscipy 2012)

This document discusses Python modules and how to organize code into reusable modules. It provides examples of importing common scientific computing modules like NumPy and SciPy. It warns against using wildcard imports from modules like os. Finally, it provides a brief example of defining your own module in a .py file to organize and reuse code.

Uploaded by

claudyane
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Python Scientific lecture notes, Release 2012.

3 (EuroScipy 2012)

In [1]: import os

In [2]: os
Out[2]: <module ’os’ from ’ / usr / lib / python2.6 / os.pyc ’ >

In [3]: os.listdir(’.’)
Out[3]:
[’conf.py’,
’basic_types.rst’,
’control_flow.rst’,
’functions.rst’,
’python_language.rst’,
’reusing.rst’,
’file_io.rst’,
’exceptions.rst’,
’workflow.rst’,
’index.rst’]

And also:
In [4]: from os import listdir

Importing shorthands:
In [5]: import numpy as np

Warning:

from os import *

Do not do it.
• Makes the code harder to read and understand: where do symbols come from?
• Makes it impossible to guess the functionality by the context and the name (hint: os.name is the name
of the OS), and to profit usefully from tab completion.
• Restricts the variable names you can use: os.name might override name, or vise-versa.
• Creates possible name clashes between modules.
• Makes the code impossible to statically check for undefined symbols.

Modules are thus a good way to organize code in a hierarchical way. Actually, all the scientific computing tools
we are going to use are modules:
>>> import numpy as np # data arrays
>>> np.linspace(0, 10, 6)
array([ 0., 2., 4., 6., 8., 10.])
>>> import scipy # scientific computing

In Python(x,y) software, Ipython(x,y) execute the following imports at startup:


>>> import numpy
>>> import numpy as np
>>> from pylab import *
>>> import scipy

and it is not necessary to re-import these modules.

2.6.3 Creating modules

If we want to write larger and better organized programs (compared to simple scripts), where some objects are
defined, (variables, functions, classes) and that we want to reuse several times, we have to create our own modules.
Let us create a module demo contained in the file demo.py:

2.6. Reusing code: scripts and modules 26

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