On Jan 22, 2012, at 11:06 PM, Clifford Sobchuk wrote:
> perlbrew, alien and local::lib
perlbrew is great as it allows you to install your own perl, or, if you want,
many different versions of perl, in your own home directory, completely under
your control. Additionally, it allows you to easily switch between the
different versions, perhaps for testing purposes.
dunno nothing about alien.
I believe local::lib allows you to install perl modules in your home directory,
but I can't really understand its purpose once I have perlbrew. I guess
local::lib is for that scenario where you want to use the system provided perl,
but want to augment it with your own modules.
wrt, PDL being standalone vs. being easy to install --
a standalone PDL (a la SciPDL) would enable its quick and rapid use the way the
self-standing R package allows. The R package (all my experiences are Macs
only) just works. Download, install, use. Everything works, graphics windows,
output, everything. However, it is not easy to incorporate that into some other
workflow, perhaps, in your web application.
For example, I am now using R in my perl Dancer driven web application from
within Postgres where I have compiled PL/R as a lang. It is as simple as
writing a Pg function in R and then calling it from perl like so
$dbh->prepare(qq{
SELECT rFunc( array_agg(col) )
FROM table
WHERE ...
});
An easy to install PDL would allow both... quick, standalone usage as well as
incorporating it in the rest of the work.
I believe PDL installation is already getting easier and easier thanks to
everyone's (Chris Marshall in particular, I suppose) hard work.
My greatest obstacle to using PDL right now is wrapping my head around its
idiosyncrasies (I have to stop thinking like perl data structures and start
thinking piddles), and especially being able to write my own PP code (or
whatever the correct term is).
I hope one day writing my own vectorized PDL function that would operate on an
arbitrary piddle will become as easy as writing perl code. That would be the
biggest breakthrough in PDL use.
--
Puneet Kishor
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