Scientific computing with D

[Bill Baxter]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 7:51 PM, Walter Bright
<newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote:
> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>
>> I use NumPy often for it's interactive capabilities.  Plotting and
>> exploring data at the Python prompt.   That's hard to do with a
>> compiled language.    A static language like D cannot satisfy that
>> kind of use-case easily.  Maybe Sci-MiniD there? :-)
>
> The D compiler is fast enough that this should be quite doable. On my 6 year
> old XP machine, compiling and linking a program a few lines long takes less
> than half a second.

It's more the interactive prompt part that's hard to do with a
compiled language.  Where I have a big array of data, and don't really
know what it looks like.   So I plot it.  Then I see some funny bumps.
 So I do an fft on it and plot that to see if there are any suspicious
spikes.  And i notice something there which gives me an idea to try
something else.  Or I figure out the component that I'm not interested
in and subtract that off.  Etc.

Having to recompile and rerun after every one of those changes just
isn't quite as direct.

On the other hand sometimes the thing you're doing gets too
complicated for one-liners at the command prompt and you have to move
to a script.  For that D would potentially be able to hold its own.

--bb