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About alternatives to Matlab

Jon Harrop jon at ffconsultancy.com
Sun Dec 10 05:23:17 EST 2006 
Konrad Hinsen wrote:
> The lack of polymorphism, particularly in operators, makes OCaml code
> a pain to write and read in my opinion.

F# addresses this by adding operator overloading. However, you have to add
more type annotations...

> Interfacing to C and Fortran code is important because that's what
> most libraries are written in. While it is possible in principle with
> OCaml, it is (or at least was at the time I looked) a pain to
> interface typical array-handling code, for lack of a compatible data
> structure on the OCaml side.

You want bigarrays, they are just C/Fortran arrays. Look at the bindings to
FFTW/LAPACK, for example.

> Native code compilation is obviously important for speed. While many
> popular processors are supported by ocamlopt, scientific users are
> notorious for grabbing whatever fast hardware they can lay their
> hands on. It seems safe to count on the GNU suite being ported
> rapidly to any new platform.

OCaml already supports 9 architectures and optimised to AMD64 earlier than
gcc. How many do you want?

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
Objective CAML for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/index.html?usenet
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