The functionalities of BoA are accessed by directly calling the appropriate methods from the interactive python layer. This ensures the full availability of all python and ppgplot facilities. As the method names to be called from the python layer may be rather long, the start script BoaStart.py provides a set of convenient abbreviations for those methods which are meant to be called from the user (``public'' methods).
Example: The name of the method to open a new graphic device is DeviceHandler.openDev and can be called by
DeviceHandler.openDev()or more comfortable by
open() or ope() or op()where the parentheses are mandatory.
Python ensures no real difference between private and public attributes. There are only hidden attributes but this hiding can be overcome easily. Therefore the user might set any attribute directly and call any method. This is not advisable and may easily corrupt the whole BoA session. It is more recommendable to just use those methods for which the start script BoaStart.py provides abbreviations. In the following these are called user methods. A detailed description of all user methods, their arguments, output and abbreviations is given in section 5.5.