ipython 0.10

An interactive computing environment for Python

The goal of IPython is to create a comprehensive environment for interactive and exploratory computing. To support this goal, IPython has two main components:

• An enhanced interactive Python shell.

• An architecture for interactive parallel computing.

The enhanced interactive Python shell has the following main features:

• Comprehensive object introspection.

• Input history, persistent across sessions.

• Caching of output results during a session with automatically generated references.

• Readline based name completion.

• Extensible system of ‘magic’ commands for controlling the environment and performing many tasks related either to IPython or the operating system.

• Configuration system with easy switching between different setups (simpler than changing $PYTHONSTARTUP environment variables every time).

• Session logging and reloading.

• Extensible syntax processing for special purpose situations.

• Access to the system shell with user-extensible alias system.

• Easily embeddable in other Python programs and wxPython GUIs.

• Integrated access to the pdb debugger and the Python profiler.

The parallel computing architecture has the following main features:

• Quickly parallelize Python code from an interactive Python/IPython session.

• A flexible and dynamic process model that be deployed on anything from multicore workstations to supercomputers.

• An architecture that supports many different styles of parallelism, from message passing to task farming.

• Both blocking and fully asynchronous interfaces.

• High level APIs that enable many things to be parallelized in a few lines of code.

• Share live parallel jobs with other users securely.

• Dynamically load balanced task farming system.

• Robust error handling in parallel code.

The latest development version is always available from IPython’s Launchpad site.