First steps

Hi Christophe, 

Here's a first commit of my code. Guaranteed incomplete and buggy at this stage! 

There's a bunch of infrastructure here as well:
  * organizing the code as one Python package containing multiple source files, from which only a subset of functions are exposed as the public API
  * automated packaging & distribution using PyPI 
  * generation of HTML documentation using Sphinx. 

I'm skipping you over the learning curve part where I had to figure out how to set that all up myself... :-) Since you're just getting started in Python I expect that much of this may be cryptic but let's chat on Skype sometime and I can walk you through some of the relevant details. 

In the mean time, take a look at http://www.stsci.edu/~mperrin/software/mcfostpy/index.html

That's the HTML documentation that gets built if you cd to the docs directory and 'make html' (once you have Sphinx installed on your system with the proper extensions, that is). I've fallen in love with Sphinx as a documentation generator - it works great and produces beautiful output. I'm using it for my IDL code now as well as Python.