On Jan 21, 2:44 am, Harald Schilly <harald.schi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 21, 6:21 am, rjf <fate...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > In my experience, people doing scientific calculations for a living
> > will not tolerate a language implementation X whose programs are
> > substantially slower than equivalent ones in a language implementation
> > Y.
>
> I don't know any details, but I think there are valid cases where one
> wants calculation to act the same on all platforms.
Sure.
> One possible
> example are spacecrafts, where the calculations in space should act
> the same way as they were developed on ground.
Sure. I can't imagine any engineer debugging a life-critical system on
a Mac and then running it on a PC,
putting one of them on a spacecraft and leaving one on the ground.
Surely your supposition that this is a justification for anything has
no support in reality.
>This is part of robust
> calculations, interval analysis and enclosures, and much more like
> this.
The reproducibility of results on one computer with one language, but
at different times,
is already hard enough. What are you willing to sacrifice for your
concept of robustness?
Will you, for example, freeze the version of the operating system
forever?
That would actually be a really good move for some applications,
including spacecraft.
So, I think the developer/user has to think about the actual
> goals, speed vs. reproducibility, and if possible control what
> happens.
I am sure that some Sage people have thought about such things, but
probably not
enough. Which is why I try to poke holes in some of these comments!
> Also, since you can call C for a function from java or python pretty
> easily, you can always gain more control about the behaviour.
C does not run the same on every computer, and C does not provide
handles for
every feature of every computer in a uniform fashion. You can (I
think) also call
assembler from Java or Python, and that might be preferable. Of course
the assembler would
depend on the machine more obviously than the C depends on the
machine.
It would be much simpler for Sage if only one computer and operating
system were supported.
But the topic of this thread is supposed to be something about
comparing 2 languages for scientific computing.
Whatever that might be.
R.
>
> h
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