From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id SAA24260 for caml-red; Wed, 27 Dec 2000 18:58:12 +0100 (MET) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id CAA08305 for ; Wed, 27 Dec 2000 02:44:57 +0100 (MET) Received: from sirius-b.ihep.su (sirius-b.ihep.su [194.190.161.4]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id eBR1ipf28596 for ; Wed, 27 Dec 2000 02:44:51 +0100 (MET) Received: from ihep.su (ihep.ihep.su [194.190.161.127]) by sirius-b.ihep.su (8.10.0/8.10.0) with SMTP id eBR1imb08873; Wed, 27 Dec 2000 04:44:48 +0300 (MSK) X-Sender: vsl@ontil.ihep.su Received: from ontil.ihep.su by ihep.su (5.65v4.0/RELCOM-IHEPv4.7) id AA13419; Wed, 27 Dec 2000 04:44:46 +0300 Date: Wed, 27 Dec 2000 05:39:53 +0300 (MSK) From: Vitaly Lugovsky To: Semenova Natalya Nickolaevna Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: Is Caml a suitable tool for complicated mathematical methods. In-Reply-To: <00122200235700.00634@snob.spb.ru> Message-Id: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr 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)