From: Michel Demazure <michel@...>
Date: 2010-12-16T19:54:48+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and science ?

Phillip Gawlowski wrote in post #968809:
>> Numerical computing, statistics, whatever, cannot be coded in pure ruby
>> and you have to rely on specialized libraries.
>
> Why? Unless you need more accuracy than the IEEE float provides, you
> should be fine in Ruby, unless performance is a major issue, where you
> can drop down to C code, if need be (for example with Ruby Inline[0]).

The issue is internal representation. For instance a matrix 1000 x 
100000, even of small ints. You need an internal representation of 
Fortran type. Actually, 'narray' does that perfectly, but is very 
limited in scope (only one real method : LU decomposition). The good 
answer seems an interface to the big tools : MathLab, SciLab,... This is 
more or less what PyMaths is about, as I understand well.

More generally, bigs things with many indices cannot be really managed 
with towers of enumerators...

_md

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