9 But Wait! There's More!

There is a lot more to Python than shown in this brief overview. For more of our introductory material, see these PDF versions of a Python tutorial we presented at STScI:

PDF Slides
PDF Slides (b&w)

Python's object system provides great flexibility and allows operator overloading, special syntax enhancement (for example, making subscripting behave in a special way for a new class), introspection features (allowing run-time examination of objects to determine their characteristics), and all sorts of other goodies. But explaining these really does require a book.

Python also has many modules (libraries if you will) available to do string manipulation, regular expression matching, operating system access, etc. See the Python library reference and books listed below for documentation of the standard library. One interesting module is Numeric, which adds a numeric array data type to the language and allows easy array computations. We are not currently using many of Numeric's capabilities but intend to make it a focus of much of our future enhancements of PyRAF. In fact, we are in the process of rewriting the Numeric module (as numarray) to make it more flexible and maintainable. We are also developing a Python FITS module, pyfits, that provides powerful but intuitive access to FITS files.

Questions or comments? Contact help@stsci.edu
Documented updated on 2004 Jun 1