“Computational Civil Engineering - "Intersections" International Journal

“Computational Civil Engineering 2005”, International Symposium 63The entire task was possible by using PYTHON in combination with wxPython andBoa Constructor. wxPython stands for a port of wxWidgets to Python, i.e. theimplementation of windows, buttons, scrollbars, etc., as elements of a GUI, fortheir direct use under PYTHON. Boa Constructor is a powerful tool for editingPYTHON files and arranges GUI elements on a frame.So, we did a mix. It is the programming, on one hand, and elements of CivilEngineering disciplines, on the other. Using a laptop and a big screen projector wecan now better explain the matter issues. But this is a point of view. Seeing the factfrom another point of view, we succeeded in new concepts and languageappraisals. We know now how to integrate a perfect heavy computation tool(FORTRAN) with a GUI, with network facilities, with database server access, andwith XML facilities, all platform independent.After all these gains, we put ourselves, rhetorically, a single question: Why notdeveloping ourselves the tools we need for teaching, just by teaching newprogramming languages and not a single one?For anyone curios about how a PYTHON script is looking, we give in Figure 3 afragment of the code for the application shown in Figure 2. One can observe thatthe syntax is close to the C and C++ programming languages, even if it has a veryinteresting particularity: the white space is important. That means that theprogrammer is obliged to take care of the source layout, as the statements that aremore in-depth are subordinated to the one which is less nested. One can observehow an if statement is looking like, in the Figure 3.We underline that all the tools we used are free of charge, and can be downloadedfrom INTERNET. This aspect is very important in teaching, as most of the studentshave computers at home, or have access to a collegue's one. This mean that we hadbeen used commercial software, the students could do their homework using onlycommercial software. As most of them do not have enough financial support, wewould encourage them to use pirated software. But our mission is to teach for thegood behaviour, not for a bad one. Or this is not a part of our mission?