Re: Is Caml a suitable tool for complicated mathematical methods.

[Vitaly Lugovsky <vsl@ontil.ihep.su>]

On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Semenova Natalya Nickolaevna wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> We are going to rewrite a large bundle of Fortran-3 (!!!) sources to some
> "better" language. Sources are the solution of the system of differential
> equations in partial derivatives by normal finite differencing methods. 
> 
> Two candidats are voted: Pascal and Ocaml. Is Caml convenient tool for such
> tasks?

 OCaml is a good tool to automate this migration to any other language.
But the target language, IMHO, shall be Fortran-90, not ocaml or pascal.
Pascal is not situated for numerical tasks at all, it's a dead language,
and OCaml can be too slow for your task (not SO slow, but, of course,
slower then good old Fortran). If you really need a fast and modern
language for numerical computations, there is no better choice then latest
Fortran realizations. Think about it: automatic parallelism (on SMP),
VERY good optimizations, easy-to-proove syntax. btw, you can even use
ocaml to proove your Fortran code automatically.

--

   V.S.Lugovsky aka Mauhuur (http://ontil.ihep.su/~vsl) (UIN=45482254)