On Wednesday 26 January 2005 21:18, Micha Feigin wrote:
> On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 19:03:41 +0200
>
> Shlomi Fish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Wednesday 26 January 2005 18:04, Micha Feigin wrote:
> > > On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 10:52:14 +0200
> > >
> > > [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Yedidyah Bar-David) wrote:
> > > > On Wed, Jan 26, 2005 at 10:25:58AM +0200, Ira Abramov wrote:
> > > > > Quoting Tzafrir Cohen, from the post of Wed, 26 Jan:
> > > > > > On Tue, Jan 25, 2005 at 04:28:12PM +0200, Micha Feigin wrote:
> > > > > > > first also makes people use c++ as a functional language
> > > > > > > instead of as
> > >
> > > an OO
> > >
> > > > > > > language.
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Just to get the terminology right: I figure you meant
> > > > > > "procedural".
> > > > >
> > > > > every 9-12 months, this argument about the best first language
> > > > > comes up. half of the people arguing with opinions they won't gudge
> > > > > from and half trying to throw in half-knowledgable remarks to show
> > > > > they too exist, and never does anyone agree.
> > > > >
> > > > > so allow me to add to the tradition! Python, gentlemen! it can be
> > > > > OO or Procedural (and even pure functional I was once told). the
> > > > > syntax is clean, very little syntactic sugar, no odd compilersyntax
> > > > > for a newbie to learn, richer than Java, clearer than C and C++,
> > > > > and more widely used in the practical world than Pascal or LISP.
> > > >
> > > > And, may I add, has a nice, free book, called "Learning with Python".
> > > > Maybe not as deep as "Structure and Interpretation ...", but not bad
> > > > either.
> > >
> > > Notice that "Structure and Interpretation ..." is not a lisp book, it
> > > used lisp as a tool. Will have to look at learning python though,
> > > always wondered if its going to be useful enough for me to spend the
> > > time learning, although I think that for my work I am stuck with matlab
> > > and c (really don't feel like learning fortran at this point ;-)
> >
> > Well, Perl, Python and friends can be used for many tasks for which
> > neiter Matlab nor C would be very suitable. Things like text processing
> > and generation, GUI programming, system administration, database
> > handling, networking, etc.
> >
> > Of course, the combination of Matlab and C would be more suitable for
> > different tasks. I used Matlab extensively at the Technion, and I was
> > very impressed by the ease of programming certain tasks by translating
> > them to tensors' manipulation. Of course, Matlab as a language (from the
> > CS point-of-view) sucks pretty badly and it also has a very limited
> > debugger.
> >
> > There is a Perl extension called PDL (= Perl Data Language), which aims
> > to supply Perl with the same functionality as Matlab and similar
> > programs. (http://pdl.perl.org/). I suppose there are similar extensions
> > for other agile languages.
>
> Worked a bit with PDL and it was nice, IIRC there is a similar extension
> to python, but I have no experience with it.
I think it's called SciPy. I think it's not as complete as PDL, which is
itself not as complete as Matlab.
> There is scilab which is a
> nice free matlab like environment. I don't have much experience with it
> wither but it seems better then octave.
Yes. Scilab, however, is incompatible with Matlab in its syntax (some things
there are more powerful, or otherwise different). There's a program that
converts Matlab code to Scilab one, but not the other way around.
>
> There are also numerous libraries for c (a lot of them written in fortran
> BTW) which allow you to do almost anything.
>
Hmmm.. yes.
> I'm somewhat stuck with matlab, with occasional excursions to c though
> since I need to collaborate with others.
>
OK.
> > BTW, I heard from some people who wrote programs in Matlab for their
> > projects and home-assignments, that took hours on end to run. My programs
> > never took a
>
> Depends on how they wrote them and how heavy the computation is. I have
> well written programs that can run for several hours but considering the
> program built a 50,000x50,000 matrix and then computed the first 3000
> eigenvalues I think three hours is a short time.
>
Right. I don't suppose the same program in C would have been much faster.
> > lot of time to run, but then again, I knew how to translate them into
> > efficient Matrix manipulations. Is it normal for some Matlab program to
> > take a lot of time to run, even if it's well-written, or does this
> > indicate Matlab illiteracy?
>
> If you write your code to use matrix notation it will run rather fast.
> Matlab can be rediculosly slow with loops. I tried writing the same code
> using matrix notation and loops and it turned out to be a difference of a
> few seconds compared to over an hour.
:-) Nice.
>
> BTW matlab also has a profiler and you can alway use the internal compiler
> to make faster running executables.
OK.
>
> > (Matlab is interpreted by default, but its matrix operations and many
> > built-in-functions are hard-coded.)
>
> You can also write extenssions in c and java.
>
Right. Of course, most students don't have the knowledge and/or time
constraints to do this.
Regards,
Shlomi Fish
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