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Re: Octave and Guile?


From: Nicolas Neuss
Subject: Re: Octave and Guile?
Date: 14 Sep 2000 09:43:35 +0200

"John W. Eaton" <address@hidden> writes:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm the primary author of GNU Octave, an interpreted language for
> numerical mathematics with a syntax similar to Matlab.
> 
> Would there be any interest within the Guile community for some sort
> of merger of Octave and Guile?

I would be interested in that.

> I am asking because I was recently approached with the idea of
> merging parts of Octave with Python, and although it seemed like a
> nice idea at first, I am no longer so sure about it.  While thinking
> about the advantages and disadvantages of merging Octave with
> another scripting language, I started thinking more about how this
> might work with Guile, and wondering whether it might be a better
> choice.

Do they need it, i.e. is NumPy not sufficient?

> I think it is important for this application to use a translator
> instead of expecting users to write Scheme code directly.  Although
> Scheme is probably a good language for many tasks, and some hardened
> Scheme hackers may actually prefer to write (+ a (/ (* b c) (- d
> e))), most people I have worked with who do any numerical
> programming would much prefer to write things like a + b * c / (d -
> e), since it looks more like what they write on paper.  It also
> seems natural to me that one would use different languages for
> different problem domains and this idea seems to fit well with one
> of the primary goals of the Guile project (universal scripting).

Also the possibility of executing at least a part of MATLAB scripts is
important, I guess.

> Is anyone here interested in such a project?  Comments and discussion
> would be most welcome.

As I said I would be interested.  But I'm not good enough in
Scheme/Guile to implement a translator in a reasonable time.
Probably, someone from the experts could provide a scratch
implementation to start with.

There was some discussion about language translation in July/August on
this list.  Did you follow that?

> Thanks,
> 
> jwe
> 

Yours, Nico.

P.S.: By the way: is there a working CTAX at the moment?  I'd like to
have a look at it.



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