Page - 11 - in Programming for Computations – Python - A Gentle Introduction to Numerical Simulations with Python 3.6, Volume Second Edition

1.2 APythonProgramwithVariables 11 The documentationfor Spyder8 might be useful to you. Also, more information onwritingand runningPythonprogramsis found inAppendixA.4herein. Whynotapocketcalculator instead? Certainly, finding the answer as with the program above could easily have beendonewithapocketcalculator.Noobjectionstothatandnoprogramming wouldhavebeenneeded.However,whatifyouwouldliketohavetheposition of the ball for every milli-second of the flight? All that punching on the calculatorwouldhave takenyousomething like4h! If you know how to program, however, you could modify the code above slightly, using a minute or two of writing, and easily get all the positions computed inonegowithina second. An even stronger argument, however, is that mathematical models from real life are often complicated and comprehensive. The pocket calculator cannot cope with such problems, even not the programmable ones, because their computational power and their programming tools are far too weak comparedtowhata real computercanoffer. Writeprogramswith a texteditor When Python interprets some code in a file, it is concerned with every character in the file, exactly as it was typed in. This makes it trouble- some to write the code into a file with word processors like, e.g., Mi- crosoft Word, since such a program will insert extra characters, invisible to us, with information on how to format the text (e.g., the font size and type). Such extra information is necessary for the text to be nicely formatted for the human eye. Python, however, will be much annoyed by the extra charactersin thefileinsertedbyawordprocessor.Therefore,it is fundamental that you write your program in a text editor where what you type on the keyboard is exactly the characters that appear in the file and what Python will later read. There are many text editors around. Some are stand-alone programs like Emacs, Vim, Gedit, Notepad++, and TextWrangler. Others are integrated in graphical development environments for Python, such as Spyder. 8 See, e.g., https://www.spyder-ide.org/.