4.1 A Few Important Concepts

To make the most of PyPedal you, the user, need to have a solid understanding of your dataset as well as of the PyPedal API. While Python is an object-oriented programming language, PyPedal is at heart a procedural tool. One of the exceptions to this rule is what PyPedal terms a pedigree, which is a Python list containing Animal() objects. The first step in most PyPedal analyses is to read your pedigree into PyPedal from a textfile. After that, you will spend most of your time passing your pedigree from one procedure to another. But always remember that the elements in the pedigree are objects!