On Monday, July 7, 2003, at 02:57 PM, Luis Campos de Carvalho wrote:
Andy Wardley wrote:Toby Corkindale wrote:I'm not convinced Perl is the best language to implement such things.Why not? Performance concerns or something else? That's a serious question by the way, not just me being provocative.
I think that Perl is not that good on number crunshing.
Maybe you should look at fortran (old and good!) or some number-crunshing-specialist tool.
on the other hand, perl is excellent for use as glue between number crunching tools written in compiled languages. you do all the heavy lifting in C or fortran, then recombine your heavy lifting in many different ways with application logic in perl.
especially good if you need to dump the results of your number crunching into a database (DBI is much easier than most C interfaces) or get the input data from a text file (perl is da bomb for string handling).
in fact, a friend of mine recently wrote XS bindings for a C++ neural net library, and was talking about putting them on CPAN, i'll have to check on that.
