Group items tagged

SVGMath is written in pure Python, with neither extension modules nor external dependencies. It runs on any platform where a modern Python environment (version 2.4 or higher) is available. It can be used either as a command-line script for batch-mode file conversion, or as a component to process MathML data in other Python applications.

PyInstaller is a program that converts (packages) Python programs into stand-alone executables, under Windows, Linux and Irix. Its main advantages over similar tools are that PyInstaller works with any version of Python since 1.5, it builds smaller executables thanks to transparent compression, it is multi-platform (so you can build one-file binaries also under Linux), and use the OS support to load the dynamic libraries, thus ensuring full compatibility. PyInstaller is an effort to rescue, maintain and further develop Gordon McMillan's Python Installer (now PyInstaller). Their official website is not longer available and the original package is not longer maintained. Believing that it is still far superior to py2exe, we have setup this site to continue its further development. Feel free to join us in the effort! Please consult our Roadmap to check our plans. Also usage reports are welcomed: let us know if PyInstaller works for you and how, or what problems you found in using it.

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: