From: Paulo Jabardo <pjabardo@...>
Date: 2005-07-08T03:56:23+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby as mathematical language



> One option would be to reimplement rb-gsl using
> SWIG. GSL is pretty big, 
> but wrapping it with SWIG might not be too hard if
> its interfaces are 
> implemented using a small number of types. You have
> to write two or 
> three typemaps for each type, and SWIG does the
> rest.
ruby-gsl already wraps most of gsl. From what I've
seen on this list, the problem is the Vector and
Matrix libraries, even though they seem to work fine
in ruby-gsl even though it does not use every OO
concept available to ruby users.

 
> I've wrapped two libraries with SWIG. and while I
> don't consider myself 
> an expert, I have learned a few things. I'd be
> willing to help get 
> things kicked off.
> 
> One thing to bear in mind, however. Wrapping
> (whether with SWIG or not) 
> often requires copying input and output parameters.
> That's usually not a 
> big deal, but you might take a substantial
> performance hit if you're 
> passing large numbers of large arrays through a
> wrapper.

This really could hurt in many situations.

 
> Much of the value of Matlab is not the language
> itself, but the large 
> number of libraries available for specialized
> applications like control 
> systems and signal processing. That's much harder to
> replace than the 
> underlying execution engine. (Which is, of course,
> part of the reason 
> Fortran is still with us.)

You hit the nail! But remember that now there are many
Free/OS libraries available. But even if we wrapped
and developped many numerical libraries I don't think
ruby (or python) would be the ideal language for
computation. R/S-PLUS, for instance, were designed for
this purpose alone and I think it is a great language.
Even matlab has a language appropriate to numerical
computation (I don't like matlab's language).

Good graphics capabilities is very important for a
mathematical environment to succeed.

Paulo





	
	
		
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