Bill I agree with most of what you say but let me make two positive observations.
On Jun 27, 2006, at 8:31 PM, Bill Coffman wrote:
1. The last release was almost two years ago.
I'd describe the PDL code as 'stable'. I can run code I wrote 7 years ago with no problems. Of course this is not to say it is not time for fresh efforts which may lead to instability. PDL3 anyone?
2. The cvs code is pretty bad. The new eigens function (from ssl -- probably not such a great acronym for "small scientific library") was apparently never tested on a matrix larger than 2x2. Opengl didn't even compile. Since I only looked at a small portion of PDL, I must assume that there is a lot more problems where that came from.
I also have found in years of use that it is remarkably bug free once you master the curly syntax and despite the very curly underlying code. I think your case is an isolated instance. I do not get the reference to 'eigens from ssl'
2. Amazing capabilities and speed. This is really an awesome package guys.
Achieving speed is no mean feat. There's lots of packages out there which are godawful slow. (How does numpy fair?) Our speed comes from the basic design decision that the fundamental data structure would be a C array and when you come down to it all the basic arithmetic is straight forward C loops (or optimizes to that). It also makes it very easy to call C maths subroutines. This is something we SHOULD hang on to.
Karl _______________________________________________ Perldl mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl
