From: "Ara.T.Howard" <Ara.T.Howard@...>
Date: 2005-07-08T02:22:07+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby as mathematical language

On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, none wrote:

> Hi Ruby world.
>
> I am attaching some pieces of an email conversation I had with Yoshiki
> Tsunesada regarding his excellent work rb-gsl.  I wanted to start a
> discussion about what extensions would make Ruby an intuitive and
> powerful math language;  I think he has already laid the foundation,
> but there are some important pieces that we could add, especially in
> the realm of indexing and assigning to matrices (and possibly in the
> realm of graphics too).  Feel free to comment :)
>
> **********
>
> Yoshiki said:
>
> As mentioned in ruby-talk, by Nobu Nakada, the C coding
> in Ruby/GSL seems to be somewhat "old-fashioned". My excuse
> is that I studied Ruby-C API in ruby-1.4 ages, and I just
> followed a "framework" explained in a Ruby textbook
> written in that days. I have not followed the current
> framework, although I still don't know what is the
> "franework".
> Because of this, it is impossible to create a subclass
> of a Ruby/GSL class in a Ruby script, while still possible
> in C. The definition of the singleton method "new" in C
> is the problem, but I don't know how to improve it
> (for all the classes in Ruby/GSL). Sorry for inconvenience.
> This problem must be improved in a future version of Ruby/GSL,
> to be extensible easily from Ruby, not from C.
>
> You can still implement your new interfaces using C API,
> but you may not prefer it. If you show all your requests
> you want to do in Ruby/GSL, I will code them in C. I want
> to put aside the framework problem for a while, since
> it is rather messy to change the coding all for the classes.
> ********
> I replied:
>
> I wish I was a better programmer and could implement my extensions in
> ruby-gsl's C.
>
> My extensions involve array indexing and assignment, but if you are
> interested in improving the usability of rb-gsl, you might want to look
> at Octave (http://www.octave.org) which is kind of a gnu matlab.
> S-Plus/R (http://r-project.org) is also a good model, though not as
> good in my opinion as Matlab/Octave.
>
> It seems to me the numerical part of rb-gsl is fantastic, but I am
> often faced with assembling and dissassembling large (100 x 1000)
> matrices, usually composed of lots of submatrices, and rb-gsl makes
> that a little hard compared to other more mathematically oriented
> languages. The problem with Octave and R though, is that they are quite
> limited for general programming, while Ruby is amazing.  So if you want
> do some big numerical work and put it online, you are stuck.
>
> As for recoding rb-gsl in a new framework, it might be worth waiting
> until Ruby 2 is out?  I wonder.
>
> I am compiling Octave right now, and I will send you some examples of
> what I am interested in being able to do after I have it working.

have you looked at narray?  it's quite good at decomposing matrices.  also,
this kind of dicsussion would be nice to have posted at
http://sciruby.codeforpeople.com if you're up to it.

cheers.

-a
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