On Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:07:22 -0700 (PDT), sturlamolden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>On Sep 23, 3:44 pm, Robert Singer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> Well, python is not a number crunching language. However much we would >> like it to be (we would ? :-). > >> No scripting language is. > >Not even Matlab, R, IDL, Octave, SciLab, S-PLUS or Mathematica? > No. And just to avoid eventual useless discussions which might arise, I ment to say that *in general* compiled languages are faster. We can always have discussions whether or not some newer scripting languages like some from the above list, come close, but that usually is just wasted time. Specifically, I cannot say about R, IDL or S-PLUS, since I never used those (not even heard of IDL till now). Octave and Mathematica have been with me for such a short time (we had a few licences for Wolfram's child for one year, but not my part of the company, so ...) that I would rather not give my opinion about those. I've used Matlab and Scilab for a longer time (still do actually - Matlab for measurement data acquisition, and Scilab ... well, it just sits on the disk somewhere actually), and although Matlab is quite fast when disk I/O is involved, it still comes far. >> Also, (I'm not that familiar with python yet, so I don't know how to >> do it in python), try finding the bottlenecks of your calculation. > >I did use a profiler, there is no particular single bottle-neck. You're talking about your c or your python version of the program? There is always a bottleneck - that's just the part which works most slowly. Try to find the part which takes the longest to execute, try to put it differently. If it cannot be done, go to the next slowest part. >Good compilers are too expensive, and gfortran is not good enough yet. > ? Gfortran is one of the better compilers on the market. There was, just the other day, a nice discussion on comp.lang.fortran how it is marvellous what a group of enthousiasts managed do in their time, what commercial giants still didn't. May I ask what are your main objections to it ? Best regards Bob -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
