Christian Soeller wrote:
> There might still be a need for something for those people who need FFTs
> and work on really large blocks of data. The hope would be that a perl6
> PDL would fill such a gap and be more perlish than it is now. But again
> concrete syntax ideas are needed along with a clear statement of current
> weaknesses...
>
We absolutely should cater to those needing big number crunching power. All
I meant is that we shouldn't assume everyone who does data crunching is from
the world of sophisticated mathematical software. Even those who do use such
software have very different ideas on syntax depending on whether their
background is SAS, Mathematica, SPSS, FORTRAN, or whatever...
Our goal should be to make data crunching fast and easy, and to Perl users
it should be intuitive how the syntax works. This means consistency with the
rest of Perl.
Hopefully we won't need a "Perl Data Language" anymore, since Perl 6 will be
a great data language itself. Instead, we'll have modules to link in SLATEC,
do statistical tests, implement FFTs, etc, using the powerful Perl data
structures, functions, and operators that we define here.
The 1st implementation of Perl 6 may not provide all the optimisations we've
come to expect from our data crunching language of choice. For this reason
maybe PDL will continue to exist independently in Perl 6 at least for a
while, although a fair bit of rewriting will be required for the new XS, and
to take advantage of the new syntax.
