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Finance, Scientific Users Get ActivePython Updates

Posted by kdawson on from the snakes-on-a-filing dept.

jcasman sends along this clip from PCWorld: "ActiveState has added three open source mathematics libraries to its ActivePython Python distribution that might interest financial and scientific computing markets, the company announced Thursday. The packages are being added, in part, to anticipate the demand that may arise from new proposed rules for the US financial community brought about by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. ... In April, the government agency posted a set of proposed rules for handling asset-backed securities that called for financial firms to disclose, along with their prospectus filings, the source code of the programs that generated the filings, as rendered in Python. The government agency will be accepting input about the proposed rule until August 2. The three libraries that are being added to the ActivePython package are NumPy, SciPy, and matplotlib."

6 of 131 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does Not Work with Most IDEs! by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Informative

    You need to either write COM component in Python and interface with Visual Basic that way, or use IronPython and call it from .Net like this.

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    My blog
  2. Not free, however by osvenskan · · Score: 5, Informative

    TFA and TFS fail to mention that SciPy, Numpy and Matplotlib have been added only to the Business, Enterprise, and OEM Editions of ActivePython. The Community Edition (the only one that's free) doesn't contain these libraries.

    http://www.activestate.com/activepython

    1. Re:Not free, however by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 3, Informative

      And what, exactly, prevents you from installing SciPy, Numpy, and Matplotlib into an already existing ActivePython community edition installation?

      Hint: Nothing. You download the libraries and install with the canonical 'setup.py install'

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      My blog
    2. Re:Not free, however by cyberthanasis12 · · Score: 3, Informative

      All the linux distributions I have used so far (SuSE, Mandriva, PCLInuxos, Ubuntu), all, have Numpy in their ready made packages. All you have to do is click to install it. To install SciPy, you download it, and run as installer. I don't know about matplotlib, but I suspect it as easy as SciPy.
      Thus, they are free.
      But if you want to fund python related staff, then fine.

  3. Re:Good stuff by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I use those packages on Windows without ActiveState... they are free downloads from their respective websites.
    http://www.scipy.org/Download --- NumPy and SciPy
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/matplotlib/files/matplotlib/matplotlib-0.99.3/ --- MatPlotLib
    http://www.python.org/download/ --- Python

  4. Re:Good stuff by mrcaseyj · · Score: 4, Informative

    Grandparent thought you were joking because one of the special features of python is that it doesn't use brackets for statement grouping and instead uses indenting. Thus all working python programs must be properly indented. I guess you could still complain if someone doesn't use the number of indent spaces you like for each block, but I assume your big issue is the confusion of various indenting styles rather than just the size of the indent.