Modernizing PHCpack through phcpy

Abstract

PHCpack is a large software package for solving systems of polynomial equations. The executable phc is menu driven and file oriented. This paper describes the development of phcpy, a Python interface to PHCpack. Instead of navigating through menus, users of phcpy solve systems in the Python shell or via scripts. Persistent objects replace intermediate files.Comment: Part of the Proceedings of the 6th European Conference on Python in Science (EuroSciPy 2013), Pierre de Buyl and Nelle Varoquaux editors, (2014