You might like to read
 How Java’s floating-point hurts everyone everywhere (1998)
by W Kahan, J D Darcy
and other papers (like Darcy MS thesis).
http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/JAVAhurt.pdf
for arguments that suggest  Java has certain problems with floating-
point .

On the other hand, it may be the case that Python's floating-point
spec is worse,
and the same arguments hold against Python.
(I haven't studied it).

Certainly if you are concerned with the comparison you should be aware
of the paper by Kahan.
As I recall, some of the arguments by Kahan/Dancy may have been
ameliorated somewhat by
further Java refinements.

If the argument is whether python or java makes a better language for
scripting the access to
scientific libraries, perhaps the subject of this thread should be
something else, and the comparison
should not be between python and java.

My favorite scripting language is still Lisp, but I have used visual
basic, tcl, jscript, and some others.

And if you want to look at languages widely used for scientific
computing, there are several, some with the name FORTRAN,
like Fortran 90.
and also Fortress (from Sun).  Or C.



On Jan 20, 3:35 am, David Joyner <wdjoy...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi:
>
> This is not Sage-specific, but there is an interesting thread
> on the scipy-users list that some people on this list may like to
> follow:http://projects.scipy.org/pipermail/scipy-user/2009-January/019440.html
> In particular, this pagehttp://sites.google.com/site/almarklein/python-3
> (on python vs matlab) and this 
> pagehttp://sites.google.com/site/almarklein/quest
> (on Python as the best for a scientific platform) might be interesting
> to some on this list.

This last article says,
"The most important argument is that in order to do scientific
computing, you need an interpreted programming language. Still, I
enjoyed coding C# and think it is a great language that allows making
applications in a very short amount of time.
"

This is quite interesting, but so far as I can tell, entirely
unsupported  by anything in the article.
It also suggests that the writer is kind of ignorant of programming
language technology. Perhaps
he means "interactive" rather than "interpreted"?
Or perhaps he means that for the last 50+ years since 1956, all those
people who thought
they were doing "scientific computing" in FORTRAN uh, really couldn't
have been doing that at all?

RJF

>
> - David JOyner
--~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~
To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to 
sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel
URLs: http://www.sagemath.org
-~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---

Reply via email to