David, that wiki book resource you pointed to in your previous email is closed to the public (or, with some paranoia, to me :-) )
easy visualization, you can click on a variable in the workspace window. (variable in the current memory context, the context of the workspace changes if you are inside a function while debugging, and the entire call stack is available to you so that you can change the context and look at a previous stack level to have a peek at those variables) then you can in one (or two or three) click see a plot of that data (and in two more clicks of the mouse , add a trend line) it gives you the feeling that you can do a lot, fast. a GUI doesn't have to be an application , i sometimes create disposable GUIs , let's say that i have a dataset of 100 columns , and i want to browse through them (e.g. plot) one at a time. it would take me less than 60 seconds (measured, not a figure of speech) to write a gui with an axes and "prev" "next" buttons, to switch the view from one column to another and back on request. and another 30 seconds to add a gausian filter with slider to vary its width. -- vish 2009/11/10 David Mertens <[email protected]> > Could you explain what does that Matlab IDE do? >> >> If I understand >> 1) on-going execution of code (REPL) >> 2) debugger >> 3) easy visualization of data (though I am not sure what does that mean) >> 4) creating GUI for a new application >> > > The most important thing the Matlab IDE does is it makes the user feel like > the software is more finished, polished, and integrated compared to > something like PDL. When a Matlab user tries to use PDL, everything feels > disjointed and unconnected in comparison. The Matlab IDE does offer some > niceties that are not trivial. For example, the text editor not only has > syntax checking, but it also has a lint checker and can offer useful > sugestions for improving your code. Line-by-line debugging is also handy > and I'll confess I've never gotten used to console-based debugging. (If you > could get this into Padre, you would be my hero.) Matlab also allows you to > examine the data in your REPL, including a tree-based view for tree-like > data structures. This greatly alleviates the number of 'print var_z' > statements in your interactive window. > > I've never created a GUI application using Matlab nor would I ever want to, > so I can't speak to that. Obviously PDL doesn't have anything that can > match Matlab's capabilities, but I bet that you could create an even nicer > GUI using Perl. I don't think you'd have a nice GUI builder, but you could > certainly do it without much troubl. Honestly, I think Matlab is the wrong > tool for that job. > > When it comes to visualizing data, Matlab makes things pretty easy. It > offers low-level access to things like axes so that you can programatically > tweak them pretty nicely. I'm fairly certain that PDL has the same set of > low-level capabilities as Matlab, though whether those capabilities are in > PLplot, PGPLOT, or OpenGL is not known to me at the moment. Matlab does > 'better' than PDL in that it also has a thorough set of menues that allow > you to interact with your plots so you can manually set axis scales, color > palets, axis titles, and probably much more. > > Whether this is a feature or a bug is a question of philosphy. I didn't > use it often when I used Matlab. If I'm just trying to visualize my data to > get a feel for what it's doing, then I don't need to tweak an axis or a > title. If I'm generating a plot for a presentation or a publication I > prefer to write a script so that if I change my mind on some tweak two days > after I've created it, I can edit it in my script and use that to generate > 20 new plots for me. Also, when I need to generate similar plots on new > data, I can just copy the script into my new directory and start from > something that's pretty close to what I want. > > David > > _______________________________________________ > Perldl mailing list > [email protected] > http://mailman.jach.hawaii.edu/mailman/listinfo/perldl > >
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