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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---