On Tue, 20 Nov 2007, Nathan Moore wrote:
Our institution has a site license for Mathematica and between that and a compiled langauge, I feel guilty telling my students to spend more money on something that seems to be of only marginal utility. Also, (and I'm sure I'm wrong on this), Matlab seems like a tool that's permanently in the minor leauges. Sure it has a nice IDE and makes pretty pictures, but so does mathematica. Additionally, (at least when I was using it back in the mid 90's), Matlab is an interpreted language. If you start writing "real" code on it that will run for days or months, the compiled (C/fortran) equivalent will be significantly faster (I almost said "orders of magnitude faster," but I've never been curious enough to actually make a comparison)
That's correct most of the time. Even plural. Sometimes it's not so bad, though -- it depends on whether you're in a big subroutine call that is basically looping a block of compiled code on mostly internal variables or if you're working through the usual list of "objects" maintained by an interpreted language that does real-time allocation and garbage collection. Objects simply don't stream, usually. So there is usually a hit per line, a hit for non-sequential memory access, and a few other hits along the way (e.g. I/O if the routine is busy writing to your GUI as it goes). rgb -- Robert G. Brown Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305 Durham, N.C. 27708-0305 Phone(cell): 1-919-280-8443 Web: http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb Lulu Bookstore: http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=877977 _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
