From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2003-08-21T01:31:49+09:00
Subject: Re: Numerical/Scientific programming ruby group

Armin Roehrl wrote:
>> I used Ruby and BigFloat to prototype a couple of different things 
>> last semester.  This semester, I'm doing two subjects called 
>> Computational Science; one in C and the other in MatLab.  I'll 
>> probably use Ruby to prototype some of the C stuff again.
> 
> I coded portfolio optimization code and did a lot of prototyping
> in octave (free Matlab look-alike) and ruby, then after some profiling 
> wrote a few functions in C and kept the rest in ruby and was happy. SWIG
> is good for easily getting your C-code playing nicely along with ruby.
> 
> At the beginning as I had tons of existing octave code, I simply set up
> a pipe with octave to farm out some computation.
> 
> Additionaly you might want to look at the ruby-bindings of the gsl-library.
> http://raa.ruby-lang.org/list.rhtml?name=ruby-gsl
> 
> Good luck,
>     -A.
> 
> 
> ----------------------------------------
> Armin Roehrl, http://www.approximity.com
> We manage risk
> 
> 

I was doing some prime number stuff in Ruby but got caught out by the fact 
that some operations converted to floats and then back into bignum. The square 
root function for example.

I ended up back in C with GMP - after having gotten the algorythms sorted out 
in Ruby.