From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-03-31T14:19:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Calling R from Ruby

Edwin van Leeuwen wrote:
> unknown wrote:
>   
>> Where reinvention would take too long, then perhaps it would be best to 
>> build
>> bridges.  I guess in my case I'd like to see something that could take 
>> on
>> Matlab (a closed source product).
>>     
>
> You can already do a lot of what matlab does with ruby-gsl. There are 
> also a couple of gnuplot and plotutils bridges to make plotting easy. 
> (plotutils bridge is part of ruby-gsl)
>
> For an R bridge I use a simple class that writes stuff to a script file 
> and then executes the script with R. It is far from perfect but doable. 
> But I would certainly welcome a better bridge.
>   
Both Octave and SciLab are more or less "Matlab clones", if that's what
you want. Octave is open source. SciLab is "free as in beer" and may
have loosened their license a bit since I last looked.

A few years ago, I looked at a lot of open source math and graphics
packages for inclusion in a project. The candidates were Octave,
Xlisp-Stat, Perl Data Language (PerlDL or PDL) and R. When the smoke
cleared, I picked R, even though at the time I was primarily a Perl
programmer.

That project is still going strong today, as is R and its community. I
don't think XLisp-Stat has released anything since then, Octave is more
or less stagnant and I lost track of PerlDL -- it's still the package of
choice for things like astronomical image processing.

-- 
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com