As a Pythonist who does a reasonable bit of scientific computing sorts of calculations... I'll say that although I don't have time to see just what it would do with this problem, Scipy, a Python module that uses native libraries, seems to perform quite well at such things once it one muddles through the documentation to figure out the right way to attack the problem. This is especially true if one either obtains binaries for one's specific platform, or, even better, compiles optimized libraries on the very machine on which they'll run.
System vendors, such as Sun, also offer highly-optimized standard math libraries for their machines. We haven't invested in such yet. Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
