Mac Attack

Skencil is a Free Software interactive vector drawing appliction. Known to run on GNU/Linux and other UNIX-compatible systems, it is a flexible and powerful tool for illustrations, diagrams and other purposes. A somewhat unique (for a drawing program) feature of Skencil is that it is implemented almost completely in a very high-level, interpreted language, Python. Python is powerful, object-oriented and yet easy to use. Just a few highlights about Skencil's features Bézier Curves Transformed text and images Bézier curves, rectangles and ellipses can be used as guides Gradient fills Blend groups Writes EPS files Text along a path many more...

gevent is a coroutine-based Python networking library that uses greenlet to provide a high-level synchronous API on top of the libev event loop. Features include: Fast event loop based on libev (epoll on Linux, kqueue on FreeBSD). Lightweight execution units based on greenlet. API that re-uses concepts from the Python standard library (for example there are Events and Queues). Cooperative sockets with SSL support » DNS queries performed through threadpool or c-ares. Monkey patching utility to get 3rd party modules to become cooperative »

Stackless Python, or Stackless, is a Python programming language interpreter, so named because it avoids depending on the C call stack for its own stack. The most prominent feature of Stackless is microthreads, which avoid much of the overhead associated with usual operating system threads. In addition to Python features, Stackless also adds support for coroutines, communication channels and task serialization.

Twisted is an event-driven network programming framework written in Python

Tornado is a scalable, non-blocking web server and web application framework written in Python.

The FOX toolkit is an open source, cross-platform widget toolkit, that is, a library of basic elements for building a graphical user interface (GUI). FOX stands for Free Objects for X.

FOX differentiates itself in the following way from other cross-platform toolkits: Tk is a cross-platform toolkit but does not have all of the widgets that FOX considers desirable. Qt had a different licensing model, which might have required a commercial license in some cases where FOX would not. (This is no longer the case starting with Qt 4.5.) wxWidgets promotes the use of native widgets on each supported platform. FLTK is a fast, low-footprint library that supports rapid application development, and requires less code to use, but lacks advanced widgets. All of these toolkits have some support for programming natively on Mac OS and/or Mac OS X platforms, which FOX currently does not support[

The subprocess module allows you to spawn new processes, connect to their input/output/error pipes, and obtain their return codes. This module intends to replace several other, older modules and functions, such as: os.system os.spawn* os.popen* popen2.* commands.*

Model-driven engineering (MDE) is a software development methodology which focuses on creating and exploiting domain models (that is, abstract representations of the knowledge and activities that govern a particular application domain), rather than on the computing (or algorithmic) concepts.

Metaprogramming is the writing of computer programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data, or that do part of the work at compile time that would otherwise be done at runtime.

Or in C# using Automatic Properties with compiler generated backing fields: public class Pet { public PetName Name { get; set; } public Person Owner { get; set; } }

The central component of any game, from a programming standpoint, is the game loop. The game loop allows the game to run smoothly regardless of a user's input or lack thereof. Most traditional software programs respond to user input and do nothing without it. For example, a word processor formats words and text as a user types. If the user doesn't type anything, the word processor does nothing. Some functions may take a long time to complete, but all are initiated by a user telling the program to do something. Games, on the other hand, must continue to operate regardless of a user's input. The game loop allows this. A highly simplified game loop, in pseudocode, might look something like this: while( user doesn't exit ) check for user input run AI move enemies resolve collisions draw graphics play sounds end while

idiomatic Python dictates that you (almost) never do type-checking, but instead rely on duck-typing for polymorphic behavior. There's nothing wrong with using isinstance to understand inheritance, but it should generally be avoided in "production" code

usually __iter__() just return self if you have already define the next() method (generator object)

While you are looking at the collections module, consider inheriting from Sequence, Mapping or another abstract base class if that is more appropriate. Here is an example for a Sequence subclass:

if hasattr(self.data[0], "__iter__": return self.data[0].__iter__() return self.data.__iter__()

I just found xrange() (suprised I hadn't seen it before...) and added it to the above example. xrange() is an iterable version of range() which has the advantage of not prebuilding the list