Re: Octave's and Matlab's limitations

[Dimitri Maziuk]

On 11/21/2012 10:25 AM, c. wrote:
> 
> On 21 Nov 2012, at 17:07, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:
> 
>> R is a language that was originally for statisticians, so it is
>> *marvelous* at handling data, and not just the matrix data that a
>> numerical analyst likes (Matlab originally was for numerical analysis,
>> not for data manipulation).
> 
> Being a numerical analyst I may be biased ;)
> But indeed, Matlab's language is designed to be as close as possible to the 
> everyday 
> notation used in numerical analysis and scientific computing. Actually 
> Matlab's 
> language has even influenced mathematical notation to some degree, it is not 
> uncommon 
> to see the colon notation for indexing in mathematical papers. It might be 
> just an interpreted 
> wrapper around numerical libraries but that's exactly what many of its 
> intended
> users need. And it is not even that bad to very closely mimic fortran syntax,
> actually many of my colleagues still use fortran (even fortran 77 is still 
> used a lot)

That is all true, but in many cases the data has to come from somewhere.
When it comes from other applications, it comes in files in various
formats, and that's when you start hating Jordi's #3 and 4 (and also #1
and 9).

And as I said before, when some poor shmuck is handled a bunch of matlab
7.3 scripts that don't even run in 2011b and is told to run that from a
web form, #0, 5, and 6 make sure that isn't doable.

-- 
Dimitri Maziuk
Programmer/sysadmin
BioMagResBank, UW-Madison -- http://www.bmrb.wisc.edu

signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature