On Wed, Sep 12, 2012 at 7:32 AM, Jacob Keller <j-kell...@fsm.northwestern.edu> wrote: > since this probably comes up a lot in manipulation of pdb/reflection files > and so on, I was curious what people thought would be the best language for > the following: I have some huge (100s MB) tables of tab-delimited data on > which I would like to do some math (averaging, sigmas, simple arithmetic, > etc) as well as some sorting and rejecting. It can be done in Excel, but > this is exceedingly slow even in 64-bit, so I am looking to do it through > some scripting. Just as an example, a "sort" which takes >10 min in Excel > takes ~10 sec max with the unix command sort (seems crazy, no?). Any > suggestions?
Anything but Fortran. Seriously, there are probably a dozen (or more) good solutions, and it depends on whose syntax you prefer, what external libraries you need, whether you want to someday apply your new programming skills to another project, and whether you want anyone else to be able to read your code. For me, Python wins easily, but the suggestions of Octave or R are probably just as good for a one-time script of the sort you describe. -Nat
