From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-03-30T15:33:17+09:00
Subject: Re: Calling R from Ruby

Phil Tomson wrote:
> 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. 
When you say "we", who are you referring to? People who only know Ruby?
As far as *I* am concerned, R, Axiom and Maxima are (open source) Domain
Specific Languages for mathematics. Ruby is a general-purpose
object-oriented language. Sure, Ruby is good for building
domain-specific languages, but you just aren't going to reinvent all
those wheels in Ruby.
>  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
>   
There are a few things out there, but nothing with as much horsepower as
R and the two main general purpose symbolic engines, Axiom and Maxima.
There are hundreds of person-decades involved in building those three
packages. In fact, the latter two weren't originally open source. Axiom
was a commercial product, and Maxima was a US government funded project.
R was always an open source project, however.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com