On 26 Mar, 17:59, "Erik Johnson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message > > news:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > > > OK... > > I've been told that Both Fortran and Python are easy to read, and are > > quite useful in creating scientific apps for the number crunching, but > > then Python is a tad slower than Fortran because of its a high level > > language nature, so what are the advantages of using Python for > > creating number crunching apps over Fortran?? > > Thanks > > Chris > > So, after reading much of animated debate here, I think few would > suggest that Python is going to be faster than FORTRAN when it comes to raw > execution speed. Numeric and SciPy are Python modules that are geared > towards numerical computing and can give substantial performance gians over > plain Python. > > A reasonable approach (which has already been hinted at here), is to try > to have the best of both world by mixing Python and FORTRAN - doing most of > the logic and support code in Python and writing the raw computing routines > in FORTRAN. A reasonable approach might be to simply make your application > work in Python, then use profiling to identify what parts are slowest and > move those parts into a complied language such as FORTRAN or C if overall > performance is not fast enough. Unless your number crunching project is > truly massive, you may find that Python is a lot faster than you thought and > may be plenty fast enough on it's own. > > So, there is a tradeoff of resources between development time, execution > time, readability, understandability, maintainability, etc. > > psyco is a module I haven't seen mentioned here - I don't know a lot > about it, but have seen substantial increases in performance in what little > I have used it. My understanding is that it produces multiple versions of > functions tuned to particular data types, thus gaining some advantage over > the default, untyped bytecode Python would normally produce. You can think > of it as a JIT compiler for Python (but that's not quite what it is doing). > The home page for that module is here: http://psyco.sourceforge.net/ > > Hope that help, > -ej
Ok Thanks you all for giving a little insight into what Python can actually do, I think I've read enough to convince me that Python is generally a very flexible, fast, powerful language that can be used in a wide variety of applications instead of focusing on numerical functions like fortran does. Thanks again! -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
