Boilerplate for the MBACK plugin

First off, at the very end of the file are these lines:

def registerLarchPlugin(): # must have a function with this name!
    return ('_xafs', { 'mback': mback })

As discussed in the last chapter, this special construct is what allows Larch to recognize this file as a plugin rather than just a file containing python code. Specifically, it registers the symbol mback as referring to the mback function, which we will discuss below, and places that symbol into the _xafs Group.

At the top of the file are these lines:

from larch import (Group, Parameter, isgroup, use_plugin_path, Minimizer)
use_plugin_path('math')
from mathutils import index_of
use_plugin_path('xray')
from cromer_liberman import f1f2
from xraydb_plugin import xray_edge, xray_line, f2_chantler
use_plugin_path('std')
from grouputils import parse_group_args
use_plugin_path('xafs')
from xafsutils import set_xafsGroup
from pre_edge import find_e0

import numpy as np
from scipy.special import erfc

MAXORDER = 6

The point of the various forms of python's import statement is to make features from various python modules available to our plugin.

The first line imports some functionality from Larch itself. The various use_plugin_path lines tell Larch where to find other Larch plugins. The lines following the use_plugin_path lines tell Larch to import symbols from other Larch plugins.

We import NumPy so its functionality is available to our plugin. Finally, we import the symbol for the complementary error function, erfc, from SciPy.

The last line defines a constant which will be used in several places in the MBACK plugin.