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Re: Matlab, Perl, and Python
by diskcrash (Hermit) on Jan 01, 2006 at 23:06 UTC
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Dear Dr. Guy,
Have you looked at octave ? www.octave.org
It runs most Matlab code and the graphics are useful, if not as pretty.
Diskcrash
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Dear Diskcrash,
I did. I also downloaded Scilab so I'll try that out, but I am looking for something that requires minimal effort in translating between Matlab and another language. Also, something that works well with text files, something that I noticed Matlab does not do well (in fact, I used a modified Perl script for some of that).
I will, however, try it out once I figure out Cygwin a bit better- I am currently using WinXP.
Thanks,
Dr. Guy
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Re: Matlab, Perl, and Python
by moklevat (Priest) on Jan 02, 2006 at 16:00 UTC
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I think it depends on what you are doing with Matlab and Sigmaplot. There is a nice PM tutorial on perl and math. If you are doing statistical analysis and graphing I would suggest looking into the free and open source scientific software package R. There is also a perl module to interface with R Statistics::R. Furthermore, if you are doing informatics work, you might be interested in the free/OS bioconductor add-on packages for R. | [reply] |
Re: Matlab, Perl, and Python
by jkao (Beadle) on Jan 02, 2006 at 08:32 UTC
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As others have pointed out, Octave is probably the best open-source replacement for Matlab. It uses Gnuplot for graphics, and there's a graphics front end KOctave for KDE users. Also look into xmgrace. | [reply] |
Re: Matlab, Perl, and Python
by traveler (Parson) on Jan 02, 2006 at 00:06 UTC
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I gave it a brief spin and it's pretty nasty, particularly if you look at the internals. If you're doing serious numerical work, I'd go for Octave -- it links in to your platform's BLAS and LAPACK, along with a whole lot of other third party math libs. It also has a pretty clean interface for hooking in your own C++ extensions (see here).
You're right that Octave sucks for text manipulation, but I do alright using it for bioinformatics. The best way I've found is to preprocess the input in Perl, then have your Perl script write out its results in Octave's text save-file format (which is pretty self-explanatory). Inline::Octave doesn't seem to be worth the trouble -- it's almost as easy to just use a pipe.
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Re: Matlab, Perl, and Python
by srdst13 (Pilgrim) on Jan 02, 2006 at 23:24 UTC
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Depending on your needs, look at PDL. Also, I can't say enough positive about R. It is free and will be fairly easy to pick up after using Matlab. The user community is FANTASTIC, an important aspect of anyone on a budget and in a rush. It is not at all unusual to write to the R-help email list (about 2000 posts/month) and get several replies within minutes. I work next to a Matlab user of many years and have the option of using it anytime I like, but largely because of its open-source nature and user community, I continue to use R. As for functionality, it lacks nothing next to Matlab and does have some nice features for working with perl (RSperl, Statistics::R). Finally, it is available as a binary for Windows. Just my biased 2-cents worth. Sean
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Thanks for the input. :)
I have used R in the past, but it was part of a spatial statistics course which many of us in the class wanted to forget about (don't ask, the professor was nice, but didn't know how to teach), but I will download the binary. Actually what I am doing is signal processing and modeling of ground-penetrating radar data as well as estimation/ modeling of dielectric properties and so on. I'll definitely check Octave out now that I installed the full complement of Cygwin on my machine.
Thanks,
Dr. Guy
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