Prior discussions have focused on MATLAB and J as languages. In this, there is no comparison: J is much more consistent, efficient and elegant. However, this is irrelevant to most MATLAB users, who want to solve particular problems in scientific computing. From their point of view, MATLAB is more an application than a language.
At my university, the four main areas in which MATLAB is used are solving differential equations digital signal processing image processing finance and there are "toolkits" which allow a novice to immediately solve practical problems of interest in these domains. Most actual programming in connection with MATLAB is done in other languages (notably C and Fortran), with MATLAB routines being called from the language or vice versa. Performance is important to heavy MATLAB users. Since actual language constructs will use insignificant amounts of time in comparison to the libraries, a lot of effort has been expended on making the latter work efficiently. Good performance on variant hardware is achieved through using a tunable BLAS, and there is an active secondary market. MATLAB also squeezes out extra precision on Intel hardware by using native IEEE extended doubles (64-bit mantissa). As far as I can tell, J wants to be a language, not an application, and MATLAB wants to be an application, not a language. If this is not kept in mind, comparisons will be futile. Best wishes, John ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
