From: ptkwt@... (Phil Tomson)
Date: 2006-03-30T14:43:43+09:00
Subject: Re: Calling R from Ruby

In article <1143673625.994253.121460@i40g2000cwc.googlegroups.com>,
Timothy Goddard <interfecus@gmail.com> wrote:
>May I ask what this is for? I've had to learn R recently after working
>with Ruby for a while and find myself thinking constantly "This would
>be much simpler if I could only use Ruby!". As far as I've worked out
>so far:
>
>R's advantages:
>Fast matrix library.
>Inbuilt graphing.
>Don't have to teach statisticians OO concepts.
>Specialised.
>
>R's disadvantages:
>Procedural, with highly limited function support.
>Slow loops.
>Depends on blas (and as a result libfortran).
>Specialised.
>
>For most purposes, you could do better using Ruby with a good graphing
>system (such as gnuplot). There are, of course exceptions, but I would
>consider all options first.
>

This has come up before, but maybe we need a Ruby-based DSL that could be aimed 
squarely at the likes of Matlab and R.  We'd need to distribute it with a 
graphing system so that it would look like graphing was 'built-in'.  We could 
use narray as the basis for fast matrix math.  One could stay at the DSL level 
or one could delve more deeply and learn the underlying Ruby in order to get 
the greatest advantage of this sort of math-oriented DSL: users wouldn't have 
to know Ruby, but if they did it would become a more powerful tool.  irb could 
be used for an interactive mode...

What should we call this?

rcalc
rmath
mathgem
rubysci
?

....  a good name can help something like this get started.

Phil