On Wednesday, September 12, 2012 07:32:54 am Jacob Keller wrote:
> Dear List,
>
> 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?
For the specific purpose you list -
input from tab-delimited data
output to simple statisitical summaries and (I assume) plots
- it sounds like gnuplot could do the job nicely.
Otherwise I'd recommend perl, and dis-recommend python.
Ethan
--
Ethan A Merritt
Biomolecular Structure Center, K-428 Health Sciences Bldg
University of Washington, Seattle 98195-7742
