[Haskell-cafe] Python?

[karczma at info.unicaen.fr]

Jacques Carette writes: 

> Jerzy Karczmarczuk wrote:
>> Syntax for 3D arrays?
>> Give me one single language where this is natural and immediate.
> 
> I can think of 3: Mathematica, Maple and APL.

Well, you are the village specialist on Maple here,so I won't argue too
long, but kill me, I can't see how Maple makes things more *natural and
immediate* than Matlab *in this context*.
Maple is rich, there are arrays, Arrays, Matrices (which are *not* multi-
dimensional, only two), etc., based on rtables. In which sense rtables
are more natural and immediate than multidim matrices in Matlab?
Indexing is similar (Maple has a full plethora of adjustable indexing
functions, but Matlab can achieve the same with the OO layer). 

Initialization, hmmm, in Maple there are nested lists, in Matlab it is
a bit awkward, but with 'cat' along any dimension this is not so bad. 

What else? Maple is more rich and more complicated, so it has more
potential 'power', but that wasn't my point. 

Mathematica,... well it has nested lists called Array, or Table, or Matrix
(which doesn't seem to be more than 2-dim either). Why this is better than
in Matlab? 

 -- ... from a "normal" user perspective if possible. For such a user APL
doesn't seem to be a popular option, so let's forget it, although it is
a respectable part of history of programming languages. 

========== 

> Furthermore, for 'structured' matrices (including sparse), there are 
> simple examples where both Mathematica and Maple are arbitrarily faster 
> than Matlab on LU and QR decompositions, as well as Eigenvalue 
> computations.   
> 
> While Mathematica and Maple used to be pathetic at numeric computations, 
> that has changed a lot in the last 5 years.

I would like to see some comparisons. Not that I don't believe you, but
Matlab made some progress as well (although all this "progress" is
sometimes dubious, with the slowing-down of the interface, regression
bugs, etc.; no system is ideal, Maple neither). 


Jerzy Karczmarczuk