  The ESPRESSO instrument, to be commissioned in the next months at the ESO
VLT, is bound to became a landmark in the field of high-resolution optical
spectroscopy, both for its ground-breaking science objectives (search for
Earth-like exoplanets; measure of a possible variation of fundamental
constants) and for its novel approach to data treatment. For the first time for
an ESO instrument, scientific information will be extracted in real time by a
dedicated Data Analysis Software (DAS), which includes several interactive
workflows to handle the typical analysis cases in stellar and QSO spectroscopy.
Data analysis tools in the oncoming ELT era will face very demanding
requirements from compelling science case, such as the Sandage Test: the need
of handling larger data sizes with a higher degree of accuracy, and the
possibility to compare observations and simulated data on the fly. To this
purpose, we are currently porting the solutions developed for ESPRESSO to a
wider framework, integrating the algorithms within a full-fledged set of Python
modules. The project, named "Astrocook", is aimed to provide a set of
high-level, instrument-agnostic procedures to automatically extract physical
information from the data.

Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics