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From: goldin@spot.uchicago.edu (Alexey Goldin)
Subject: Re: 'Open' languages: e.g., MATLAB
In-Reply-To: rmz@ifi.uio.no's message of 01 Jul 1996 15:08:43 +0200
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Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1996 14:49:40 GMT
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In article <ajg27cunms.fsf@solva.ifi.uio.no> rmz@ifi.uio.no (Bjrn Remseth) writes:


   > Why can't more people use functional languages for maths? Much simpler to 
   > implement and extend that hacked-togehter languages. Matlab STINKS of being
   > hacked and cobbled together, feature for feature without systematics.

   1) As far as I know, nobody have yet hooked a set of really high 
      quality numerical subroutines to a functional language and 
      packaged it like a sellable product.

   2) If you hold your nose it _is_ possible to do high quality _work_
      in MATLAB, even if the _code_ you produce probably will not be 
      very pretty (at least according to CS-standards for such things ;-)

   It would be nice if someone hooked a set of routines like Matlab's to
   a really portable ML or Scheme implementation, but today the most
   likely candidate for such a venture is probably Java.

   -- 

						       (Rmz)

   Bj\o rn Remseth   !Institutt for Informatikk    !Net:  rmz@ifi.uio.no
   Phone:+47 22855802!Universitetet i Oslo, Norway !ICBM: N595625E104337

Check out 

http://nis-www.lanl.gov/~rosalia/gnudl-doc/gnudl_toc.html

It an effort to implement some useful numerical routines in
Guile (dialect of Scheme). I personally think that Common Lisp
would be much nicer to use for this, especially because there
exists Maxima ported to GNU CL at ftp.ma.utexas.edu.

But Matlab has too many useful for numerical analysis features
--- it can easily save data in binary files, it has good
graphics, etc... In short, it is incredibly ugly but quite
useful. There are a lot of "MATLAB"-like languages around, my
favorite right now is Yorick. It has more data structures (even
lists and arbitrary structures), binary I/O is very good,
graphics is decent, it is very fast and free.

Numerical people tend to stay away from Lisp, ML, etc. because
they believe that these languages are very slow compared to
C/Fortran and very difficult to learn (both statements are wrong
for those who does not know, BTW), so there is not enough good
quality numerical algorithms for them.

If someone hacked together interface to NetCDF binary data
format library to LAPACK and to some decent graphical library
for GNU CL and began to shout about it very loudly at each
corner, situation could certainly change.



Followups are trimmed a bit.





