2. Introduction to Jython

We have already pointed out that Jython is an implementation of the Python programming language, unlike CPython which is implemented in C/C++. While these implementations provide almost identical Python language programming environment, there are several differences. Since Jython is fully implemented in Java, it is completely integrated into the Java platform, so one can call any Java class and method using the Python language syntax. This has some consequences for the way you would program in Jython. During the execution of Jython programs, the Jython source code is translated to Java bytecode that can run on any computer that supports the Java virtual machine. This chapter gives a short introduction to the Jython programming language. We cannot give a comprehensive overview of Jython or Python in this chapter: this chapter aims to describe the bare minimum which is necessary to understand the Jython language, and to provide the reader with sufficient information for the following chapters describing numerical methods and statistical techniques using the DMelt libraries.