[Haskell-cafe] matrix computations based on the GSL

[David Roundy]

On Tue, Jul 05, 2005 at 07:49:56PM +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Jul 2005, Keean Schupke wrote:
> > David Roundy wrote:
> >
> > >In short, especially since the folks doing the work (not me) seem to want
> > >plain old octave-style matrix operations, it makes sense to actually do
> > >that.  *Then* someone can implement an ultra-uber-tensor library on top of
> > >that, if they like.  And I would be interested in a nice tensor
> > >library... it's just that matrices need to be the starting point, since
> > >they're where most of the interesting algorithms are (that is, the ones
> > >that are interesting to me, such as diagonalization, svd, matrix
> > >multiplication, etc).
> >
> > This is a really good idea. I would like a Matrix library soon, not in
> > 6 years time.  Slice it up into managable pieces and keep it simple!
> 
> As I said, _that_ already exists: MatLab, HaskellDSP (with some simple
> new definitions for infix operators) ...

Except that matlab isn't a Matrix library--it's a horribly language--and
HaskellDSP doesn't seem to implement linear algebra and its interface is
such that it is probably very difficult to implement efficiently (since
efficient implementation means calling lapack).  In my opinion a decent
matrix API needs to have an opaque data type.  In other words, using
HaskellDSP to create a decent haskell Matrix library would be about as much
work as using lapack to do so.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.darcs.net