dolfin team mailing list archive

[Anders Logg <logg@xxxxxxxxx>]

Lorenzo Isella wrote:
> Dear All,
> I have just noticed the existence of a Debian/Ubuntu packages for
> Dolfin and I decided that I would like to give it a try.
> I have a few questions, which are not intended to give rise to a flame-war.
> 1)Can I use Dolfin as an almost complete replacement of commercial fem
> packages like e.g. Comsol Multyphyisics?

That depends on what you mean. DOLFIN is a library, not a 
point-and-click application so it's different.

> 2)Is it correct that if I "just" want to focus on getting equations
> solved, I should mainly concentrate upon Dolfin and I can bypass for
> now the other bits of the Fenics project? If not, I think I am in the
> wrong list.

Yes, you can ignore the other packages and just work through DOLFIN (but 
DOLFIN will use the other packages).

> 3)My background is in functional programming and I am mainly
> experienced in Fortran, R, some Python and with a rather superficial
> knowledge of C and C++.
> I thought, after browsing through the tutorial
> (http://www.fenics.org/wiki/Tutorial), that I would be nice to use the
> Python interface to Dolfin (it could make life significantly easier
> for me than using a low-level language I know rather little of).

DOLFIN has quite a high-level C++ interface that is very similar to the 
Python interface.

> However, Dolfin tutorial
> (http://www.fenics.org/pub/documents/dolfin/dolfin-user-manual/dolfin-user-manual.pdf),
> seems to discuss everything in terms of C++.

Yes, the user manual only discusses the C++ interface. This has 2 reasons:

1. The Python interface (in its current form) is pretty new (a couple of 
weeks old).

2. Writing documentation is not as fun as writing code.

> I appreciate that for
> many on this list it is probably trivial to migrate any C++ example
> into e.g. Python, but that is not the case for me. Where can I find
> anything similar but targeted to a Python rather than a C++ user?
> This insistence on Python is due to its being more high level and the
> Poisson example as a  Python script looks way shorter to code than its
> C++ counterpart.

The documentation will appear in time, but I can't say when. Feel free 
to ask questions, either here or on the wiki (FAQ).

/Anders


> I would have plenty of other questions, but these are to me the
> fundamental points right now.
> Many thanks for any answers/suggestions
>
> Lorenzo
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