Introduction to IronPython

Spotfire API scripts are written in IronPython. Python is a portable, object-oriented, interactive programming language that can interface with many system calls and libraries. IronPython is an implementation of Python that targets Microsoft's .NET Framework. It is beyond the scope of this book to provide a tutorial on Python. Please visit https://www.python.org and http://ironpython.net for comprehensive guides to the language. This section will give you a quick orientation, which should be enough to get you started with scripting, and you will get used to the syntax as we work through examples in this chapter. You will also need at least a rudimentary knowledge of programming concepts.

Control structures

All programming languages need to delineate the beginning and end of control structures such as conditional segments and iteration loops. Python does this using tabbed indents and colons. The opening statement of a control structure ends with a colon, and the next...