From: Cameron McBride Date: 2005-05-11T22:06:02+09:00 Subject: Re: ruby vs. java? > Sorry, but for numerical solutions Fortran is still a standard. That's why there are Fortran 95 and Fortran 99. well, I don't know about that. It's still around a lot, but I'm not sure I want to jump to calling it a standard. I know people that still PROGRAM IN ALL CAPS ("lowercase is for comments"), but that doesn't mean it's a practice I endorse. I like interpreted languages for development speed, but they can be computationally slow. First off, GSL is pretty handy - and can solve a lot of speed issues along with providing adequate libraries (http://rb-gsl.rubyforge.org/). Franz, you don't sound like you know C, but one of the beauties of ruby is it's ease of C binding. If you need to make some routine fast, you can just spend time on that bit, and return to ruby once it's done. Here, RubyInline can make things go even faster (http://rubyforge.org/projects/rubyinline/). Cameron