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You can use Microsoft Script Control. If you have the win32 extensions of python, you can use python in place of vb in this control -open the VBA script editor - In menus/Tools/References add Microsoft Script Control -Make a new module and declare a new MsScriptControl.ScriptControl Global sc as new MsScriptControl.ScriptControl -Initialize the language attibute with python - Note that you and users of your document must have python and its win32 extensions installed. Activestate python distribustion include it. You can put sc.language="python" in the routine Workbook_Open() Now you can import python modules using ExecuteStatement method of the control in vba and have results from python functions with eval method. One interesting thing is that you can pass an object to the control with AddObject method and have python manipulate it. And so on..

Global sc As New MSScriptControl.ScriptControl Public Function os_getcwd() sc.Language = "python" sc.ExecuteStatement ("import os") os_getcwd = sc.Eval("os.getcwd()") End Function With this you can set your Excel formula to =os_getcwd() For me it returns "C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\My Documents", which I needed to know at the time so I didn't have to screw around with the ever annoying pythonpath. You can put the first two lines of the function in the Workbook_Open hook, but I don't know where that is. I hope to use more Python in Excel soon. Hmm, actually, I suppose you can put those first two lines of the function after the Global declaration as well. I know just about zero VBScript and didn't get a chance to do anything else beyond proof of concept yet. I figured I would write something dynamic which allowed more transparent access to Python, maybe allowing formula like =py("os.getcwd()"), etc.

pyPortMidi is a Python wrapper I wrote for PortMidi. PortMidi is a cross-platform C library for realtime MIDI control. Using pyPortMidi, you can send and receive MIDI data in realtime from Python.

In short: run your existing Python software much faster, with no change in your source. Think of Psyco as a kind of just-in-time (JIT) compiler, a little bit like what exists for other languages, that emit machine code on the fly instead of interpreting your Python program step by step. The difference with the traditional approach to JIT compilers is that Psyco writes several version of the same blocks (a block is a bit of a function), which are optimized by being specialized to some kinds of variables (a "kind" can mean a type, but it is more general). The result is that your unmodified Python programs run faster. Benefits 2x to 100x speed-ups, typically 4x, with an unmodified Python interpreter and unmodified source code, just a dynamically loadable C extension module. Drawbacks Psyco currently uses a lot of memory. It only runs on Intel 386-compatible processors (under any OS) right now. There are some subtle semantic differences (i.e. bugs) with the way Python works; they should not be apparent in most programs.

Install using binary installer Download installer from http://ipython.scipy.org/dist/pyreadline-1.3.win32.exe make sure no other readline is installed run installer The configuration file pyreadlineconfig.ini can be copied from Python24/lib/site-packages/pyreadline/configuration to your HOME directory (usually c:/documents and settings/YOURNAME). When using ipython pyreadline is automatically activated. If you want to use pyreadline from the interactive prompt of the python interpreter then you have to include the code in Python24/lib/site-packages/pyreadline/configuration/startup.py in your pythonstartup file or set the PYTHONSTARTUP environment variable to point to that file. Manual can be found in Python24/share/doc/pyreadline

PyCHM - Python bindings for CHMLIB PyCHM is a package that provides bindings for Jed Wing's CHMLIB library. The chm package contains four modules, namely chm.chm, chm.chmlib, chm.extra and chm._chmlib. chm.chmlib is a low level wrapper module around the API provided by the C library chmlib. Quoted from Jed's README: chmlib is a small library designed for accessing MS ITSS files. The ITSS file format is used for Microsoft Html Help files (.chm), which have been the predominant medium for software documentation from Microsoft during the past several years, having superceded the previously used .hlp file format. chm.chm provides some high level functionality over chm.chmlib, such as access to the .chm file contents tree. chm.extra contains extra functionality to allow detection encodings in the CHM archives and to support full-text search.

What idioms should I use to make my code easier to read? Read "The Python Cookbook", especially the first few chapters. It's a great source of well-written Python code examples.

Use function factories to create utility functions. Often, especially if you're using map and filter a lot, you need utility functions that convert other functions or methods to taking a single parameter. In particular, you often want to bind some data to the function once, and then apply it repeatedly to different objects. In the above example, we needed a function that multiplied a particular field of an object by 3, but what we really want is a factory that's able to return for any field name and amount a multiplier function in that family:

Use zip and dict to map fields to names. zip turns a pair of sequences into a list of tuples containing the first, second, etc. values from each sequence. For example, zip('abc', [1,2,3]) == [('a',1),('b',2),('c',3)]. You can use this to save a lot of typing when you have fields in a known order that you want to map to names: