Paddy, thanks for your mail.
> In Digital electronics we have what are called netlists, (and also > component lists) yes, years back I did a 3rd year project on a 'logic simulator' which used the kind of thing you are talking about. I think spice does as well. Fortunately my problem is a little simpler, phew. [by the way, as an aside, check out modelia/dymola for some really powerful simulation stuff http://www.dynasim.se/ - it uses powerful symoblic algebra algorithms to derive system equations and the solve them numerically] > With a bit more effort you can create component and link factories > that will name instances with the variable they are assigned to > without having to put that information in twice. sorry - could you explain a bit more? sounds interesting and also brings me onto another question that has been bugging me, which is, if I want to create components (as object instances) at run time (rather than through a python code imported in), how do I do this? i.e. if I hardcoded something like turbine1 = turbine(...) then python knows that turbine1 is a turbine. but if I had say some kind of user interface and I want to create turbine1 (or suchlike) on the fly, how do I actually do that? how do I create objects after run time? Dave -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list