Thanks, for the note about Python, I have followed the links provided and am starting to learn to use it by reading the total beginner stuff. I am posting this here, in case any other total beginners to Python want to try it. Perhaps I can save them some time by sharing the issues I have already encountered whilst trying stuff.
I found the https://wiki.python.org/moin/SimplePrograms page and tried copy-pasting those examples into the Iolite4 Python workspace. Their first example worked without any problems.
The second one, however, gives an error message:
Their example is:
name = input('What is your name?\n')
print ('Hi, %s.' % name)
and pushing the "run" button on that gives the error:
File "", line 1, in
EOFError
:
EOF when reading a line
Finished at 2020-07-22 03:12:59.910 -- 44 ms duration
Since that error message didn't exactly give me enough information to tell what the problem is, I went looking further and found https://automatetheboringstuff.com/2e/chapter1/ which talks of an "interactive shell" in which a user will interact with a program they are running. This provided me enough information to form a basic hypothesis:
The Python Workspace provided with Iolite4 programs has been designed for programs which will interact not with the person running the program, but only with the data associated with the project, be it getting data in (importing), doing something with the data (e.g. DRS), or extracting data to be used elsewhere (e.g. exporting). Therefore it doesn't need (or have) an "interactive shell", and thus all python example programs that require an interactive shell, such as the error generating example above, won't work in this workspace.
I tested this theory by running their 3-line example program, which doesn't call for user input:
friends = ['john', 'pat', 'gary', 'michael']
for i, name in enumerate(friends):
print ("iteration {iteration} is {name}".format(iteration=i, name=name))
This one works just fine; one can add additional names to the list, and it continues to work, so long as one remembers to separate them with a comma and put the new names into single quotes.
There is still an awful lot for me to learn to achieve my goal to export my cellspace image data in a form ready to import into iogas, but I am a tiny step closer.