Glossary

Abstract

This glossary contains the description of terms used throughout the pyFormex documentation and that might not be immediately clear to first time users. Since it is expected that users will have at least a basic knowledge of Python, typical Python terms will not be explained here. Some NumPy terms are included.

array_like

Any sequence that can be interpreted as an ndarray. This includes nested lists, tuples, scalars and existing arrays.

coords_like

Either a Coords or data that can be used to initialize a Coords.

index

An object that can be used as an index in a numpy ndarray. This includes Python style slicing and numpy advanced indexing.

level

The dimensionality of a basic geometric entity. The highest level (3) are volumetric entities (cells). Surfaces (and faces of cells) are level 2. Lines (including face edges) are level 1. Finally, points are level 0.

mapping

A container object that supports arbitrary key lookups. Examples include Python’s dict, defaultdict, OrderedDict and pyFormex’s Dict and CDict.

Mesh

A geometric model where entities are represented by a combination of a table of coordinates of all points (nodes) and a connectivity table holding for each element the indices of the included nodes.

node

A point in a Mesh type geometric model.

path_like

An object that holds the path name of a file or directory. This includes str and pathlib.Path.

plexitude

The number of points used to describe a basic geometric entity. For example, a straight line segment has plexitude 2, a triangle has plexitude 3, a quadrilateral and a tetrahedron have plexitude 4. And a point obviously hjas plexitude 1.

qimage_like

A QImage, or data that can be converted to a QImage, e.g. the name of a raster image file.

re

A Python regular expression.

seed

Data that can be used as argument in the smartSeed() function. This means either a single int, a tuple containing an int ant optionally one or two end attractors, or a sorted list of float values in the range 0.0 to 1.0.