Thanks all, great response! A little more background:
I am not a programmer but I have done some programming in the past. This was all humble number crunching as part of my PhD project using FORTRAN. I also did some Rocky Mountain Basic coding for programs manipulating measurement instruments. And I did a minute amount of Turbo Pascal code, too little and too many years ago to count. Since then I have done some stuff in Matlab and (very basic) UNIX scripts. Does HTML, css and LaTeX count? So why Python? Well, I thought it would be fun to learn a little about GUI programming and a friend who is a real programmer recommended Python + PyQt. I have bought some books and lurked here for about a year but haven't managed to get going yet. I figured I needed some kind of project for that and now I have two. Learning Python and PyQt is spare time killer/brain teaser activity. The thermal contact conductance stuff is something that come in handy at work. So here is what I plan to do based on your kind advice and some thinking of my own. 1) I fix the unit thing by adding a conversion to the results presentation routine. 2) Recreating the functionality of the program in Python and PyQt will be a 'long term' educational project at home. There are various bits and pieces there: data base handling, GUI design, math, logic, error/exception handling... We have long, dark winters where I live :-) All the best, /Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list