Jelle Ferringa wrote: >Since I haven't got actual experience programming CAML I'd like to speculate >that OCAML would be a very pythonic way of extending python: its >open-source, object oriented, as fast as C, and ! garbage collecting!
The open source g95 Fortran 95 compiler is already usable and will be officially released this year. Fortran and C are comparable in speed, and if one uses allocatable arrays rather than pointers, memory leaks should not occur. Fortran 2003 supports OOP with inheritance, and a few F95 compilers already have this functionality. >That's depending on how you compare; I find OCAML quite readable compared to C / Fortran . Have you ever used Fortran 90 or 95? I don't use OCAML, so I looked at some OCAML code to multiply matrices at http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/benchmark.php?test=matrix&lang=ocaml&id=0&sort=cpu from the Computer Language Shootout . To create a matrix the OCAML code is 7 let mkmatrix rows cols = 8 let count = ref 1 and last_col = cols - 1 9 and m = Array.make_matrix rows cols 0 in 10 for i = 0 to rows - 1 do 11 let mi = m.(i) in 12 for j = 0 to last_col do mi.(j) <- !count; incr count done; 13 done; In Python with Numeric it's just x = zeros([nrow,ncol],Float) and in Fortran 90/95 it's just real, allocatable :: x(:,:) allocate (x(nrow,ncol)) There appears not to be a built-in function for matrix multiplication in OCAML. There is in Python with Numeric or Numarray or Fortran 90/95. For problems where the main data structures are arrays, OCAML seems to be considerably more low-level than Python with Numeric/Numarray or Fortran 90/95. Also, there exists a vast computational infrastructure in Fortran and C (see http://www.netlib.org). Does OCAML have this? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
