in reply to Building a better perl math library?

I don't know precisely what issues you're facing in terms of number and size of matrices (and hence, what your definition of a timely manner is), but I have had reasonable success with small-scale matrix operations using Math::MatrixReal (where by small-scale I mean inversion and multiplication of a relatively small matrix). Certainly, if you're planning on expanding that specific area you should contact Steffen Beyer and see what if anything he has planned there.

In the more general sense, I think this is a great idea, in particular with reference to the idea of having a base module in pure Perl with an optional FORTRAN/C/X backend.


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Re: Re: Building a better perl math library?
by Masem (Monsignor) on Aug 26, 2001 at 16:31 UTC
    Well, specifically, I was looking at things like eigenvalue calculations, triangularization, etc. There's also things lacking like Intergration, Differentition, etc. that aren't necessarily matrix methods, but are important mathematical concepts.

    One of the concerns that I had with the possibility of back-ending the module with standard math libraries was that the way the data was stored in a Matrix/Vector class would be such that *if* one was using the math library backend, the data would be optimized to avoid having to do any conversion from a data structure stored in perl to what is needed by the external library. This would help speed up execution by avoiding this step when it's needed.

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