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Right, but if you say people "use" something, it's disingenous (for a scientific paper) to imply that implementation details don't matter.

Had I written the paper (I'm a scientist, I work with astro data sets at times, and manage Python wrappers for Fortran and C++ libraries) I would have calculated this based on instructions executed, not lines of user-facing code.

After all, if the code the astro people called was Pure Python, they wouldn't use python, as it would be too slow.



Reminds me of the 'made in X' fallacy.

  #!/usr/bin/env python
  from subprocess import Popen
  Popen("/usr/bin/some-fortran-binary")
  print("Once again python saves the day.")




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