Importing SIC objects

Importing SIC objects (more precisely making them visible from Python) is quite easy and all the trick is based on the NumPy package and its ndarray type object. All SIC variables are imported through instances of two special classes: SicVar and SicStructure which implements numpy.ndarray features.

For compatibility and simplicity purpose, the Numeric package and its Numeric.array type is used if NumPy is not installed. The behaviors of both packages and types are quite similar, but user should take care that some methods or attributes are different from one to another (for example array representation or character string handling). In this subsection we assume that NumPy and numpy.ndarray are installed and used.