From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" <znmeb@...>
Date: 2006-07-05T04:03:27+09:00
Subject: Re: ed borasky and his second favourite programming language

Nuralanur@aol.com wrote:
> Regarding R, I'd like to hear how it compares to Gnuplot for plotting in  
> other people's
> opinion.
>   
I've never used Gnuplot -- as I noted in an earlier post, the main thing
R did well when I adopted it was boxplots. All the other stuff had
little meaning at the time, although it does now. Gnuplot is just a
plotting engine, though, isn't it? You still have to do the analysis in
some language, right?
> For scientific computations, I use the language kan/sm1.
> You can do Groebner basis calculations in differential ideals in it,
>   
Hmmm ... a hard-core algebraist. Have you looked at Singular?
> but I prefer it over Maple and Mathematica, because I like their  syntax
> even less and they don't have an efficient implementation of a b-function,  
> which
> is something I need quite dearly ( and am too lazy to implement  myself).
>   
Maple and Mathematica are also neither free as in freedom nor free as in
beer. I don't know about kan/sm1, but Singular is open source. As are
the "more general" algebra packages, Axiom and Maxima. Both will do
Groebner bases, but the Singular package is probably a lot faster --
they put a lot of effort into tuning it.

Are there Ruby bindings for Singular?
-- 

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

http://linuxcapacityplanning.com