Subject: Announcing PyDaylight 0.5

From: Andrew Dalke <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 02:07:40 -0600

PyDaylight 0.5

  Bioreason <www.bioreason.com>, a leading provider of
chemoinformatics knowledge discovery services. has developed an
interface between the Daylight toolkit and the Python programming
language and is making this package freely available under the
LGPL license.  Additional information is available from:
   http://starship.python.net/crew/dalke/PyDaylight/

and from my MUG'99 presentation at:
   http://www.daylight.com/meetings/mug99/

  The end result is that new chemical analysis algorithms can be
developed in a much shorter time and with fewer programming errors.

  Python is an interpreted, interactive, object-oriented programming
language with modules, classes, exceptions, very high level dynamic
data types, and dynamic typing.  It is a superb tool for rapid
application prototyping and development.  For more information, see
http://www.python.org/ .

  The Daylight toolkit is sold by Daylight Information Systems (see
http://www.daylight.com/).  The toolkit includes C/FORTRAN libraries
for manipulating molecular topologies, depicting the results,
conducting subgraph searches, and more.  (We don't get any money from
them for promoting their software :)

  The PyDaylight interface builds on Roger E. Critchlow Jr.'s DaySWIG
package but adds a true object-oriented interface layer above the
underlying C libraries as well as iterators, automatic garbage
collection, and exception handling.

  We develop all of our applications using PyDaylight and it has been
very stable and useful.  Since it has been an in-house project there
is very little end-user documentation or tutorials, which is why
it is labeled 0.5 instead of 1.0.  Thus, this release shouldn't be
used by someone who doesn't like reading source code to figure out
what's going on.

  However, I would like to know who might be interested in
introductory material, so if you plan on using the Daylight toolkit
and would like to try out the PyDaylight interface, please drop me a
message so I can better gauge what to work on next.

                                                Andrew Dalke
                                                [email-masked]