Hello!
I've talked about making Sageable interface to ALGLIB two months ago. It took twice as much time as I previously thought, but now it is ready to go public. You can download first beta of ALGLIB double precision interface (as .spkg or .zip file) from http://www.alglib.net/share/2010-07-08-alglib-for-sage/ Interface includes 100% of ALGLIB functions. It was tested under x86 and x86-64. I have no access to SPARC, but I think that it should work well (no endianness assumptions, etc.). More information can be found following the link above. How ALGLIB can be useful to Sage? First, ALGLIB can be used in Notebook mode. Many ALGLIB functions can be called by user almost as easy as built-in commands in MATLAB/Octave. Not all functions are easy to use in Notebook mode (for example, it is almost impossible to use numerical optimization functions interactively), but things should be improved in the next releases. I can say that current release offers Python interface, but it looks very similar to the underlying C library. Next releases will be more Pythonic in their appearance. Second, ALGLIB can be integrated deeper into the Sage. Actually, it is the main purpose of the package - to be integrated, not to be called directly (although things may change with this Python interface). For example, Sage already has built-in optimization capabilities, but ALGLIB has several optimization algorithms not present in Sage: improved Levenberg-Marquardt, L-BFGS (more efficient than CG or BFGS on high-dimensional problems). Future plans. First, I want to make this double precision interface mature enough. I am talking about improved support for Python idioms, SPARC tests, improved usability in the interactive mode. Second direction is interface to the multiple precision version of ALGLIB. I think that it will took another two months (although initially I've thought about several weeks). But I want to solve double precision issues before proceeding to multiple precision version. -- With best regards, Sergey mailto:sergey.bochka...@alglib.net -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
