Extending a scientific application with scripting capabilities

Like many of us, your application probably started out small. you had several subroutines you used daily, and over time, other people started using them as well. the more people used your subroutines, however, the more changes and additions became inevitable. To satisfy all the demands, you decide that adding scripting capability to your application was the answer, but what's the best approach? I picked COM (the Component Object Model) to implement scripting capability in Shvib for Windows. Shvib is a shock and vibration analysis program based on Tom Derby's Fortran subroutines that I have been developing at Barry Controls. Freely and commercially available scripting languages abound out there, but after investigating some of them, I decided to use Python as a scripting language for Shvib. Shvib has a Visual Basic 6 GUI and several Fortran subroutines compiled as Windows DLLs to perform computations. Because Shvib is a Windows application, COM was the natural choice to glue the Visual Basic GUI, the Fortran DLLs, and Python scripting together.