Re: [Caml-list] Interactive technical computing

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Thursday 08 March 2007 14:24, Christophe TROESTLER wrote:
> I have written a Gnuplot module that allows that.  Here is the
> compulsory screenshot :)
>
>   ftp://ftp.umh.ac.be/pub/ftp_san/Ocaml-gnuplot.png

Great stuff. Thanks. :-)

> Unless it is open source, I would not use such a product.  Having it
> open source is the only waranty for long term security.  I would not
> develop codes that cannot run 5 years later because, say, you
> unfortunately went to bankruptcy... or you became crazy and ask 10
> times more money... or...

I can't justify the time unless I get to sell something. :-)

> > > Finally, I'd like to note that operator overloading is probably
> > > the single biggest difference between my F# and OCaml code. The
> > > ability to apply + and - to many types, particularly vectors and
> > > matrices, makes this kind of work so much easier.
>
> That would not completely remove the problem of adding some operators
> but I was thinking of a possibly generic solution using Camlp4:
> writing [X.(a + b)] where [X] is a module would become [X.add a b].
> Now for matrices, one still needs + (for matrix addition), * (for
> matrix multiplication) and, say, .* (for scalar product).  So to be
> generic, one needs to be able to specify a set of operators (with
> precedences) and a way to transform an AST of that mini language into
> Caml code (that would possibly allow some optimisations, analysing the
> expression at compile time to reduce de number of intermediate
> matrices allocated).  A slicing notation also needs to be developed,
> say [a.{1, 2:3:7}], as well as a good ASCII pretty printer for
> matrices (they must be bigarrays to be able to use interesting
> libraries).

I don't think you can obtain F#'s brevity/clarity that way because you need to 
affect type inference and macros can't do that.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
OCaml for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists