Mathematical software of choice? (Archived)

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

KAlgebra is so advanced and great...and it can also factor expressions and do other cool stuff.

My fx-9860g is much easier to use IMO than the big long TI series stuff. It also draws graphs way faster and more accurately than my friends TI-84. It also pretty-prints functions and fractions and makes them look like good expressions. Except for the algebra system, it is better than the TI-89. But wait, isn't algebra what KAlgebra is meant for?

By the way, why are you writing your bachelor thesis using Matlab? Why not Octave? The language is pretty much the same, except that Matlab is proprietary, which sounds a bit funny for a programming language.

[bommel]

By the way, why are you writing your bachelor thesis using Matlab? Why not Octave? The language is pretty much the same, except that Matlab is proprietary, which sounds a bit funny for a programming language.

I have to write a MEX extension (i. e. a plugin for the Matlab API) in C. And what I've seen so far is that this API isn't well supported by other applications.

[bommel]

Nice, Matlab doesn't use the sparse matrix storage format I need thanks to its column-major order

[Clarke]

Well, sparse matrices in C are annoying. Can you use a hashtable instead?

[bommel]

Well, sparse matrices in C are annoying. Can you use a hashtable instead?

No, I have to work with special sparse matrix data types because they are expected by functions I have to call. The one-by-one conversion I did today is way too slow (it involves copying all data at least twice), but I already have an idea on how to avoid this.

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

You might want to try Octave.

[bommel]

You might want to try Octave.

I have to use Matlab, it's a requirement.

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

Stupid university. As a rule you should never require people to use proprietary languages with no open-source compiler.

[ExLibrisMortis]

You think universities obey any rules? For being some of the largest Liberal institutions, universities seem to always be the most capitalistic in nature.

[bommel]

I think the problem is that Matlab uses a lot of Fortran and therefore needs to stick to colum-major ordering. And it may even affect clones because I don't know how much of their internals must be similar to Matlab in order to support the language.

[Clarke]

You can implement column-major ordering in any language, since it's just a way to calculate indexing.

But the internals shouldn't matter anyway if the Matlab API is at all sane.

[Irtaviš Ačankif]

You think universities obey any rules? For being some of the largest Liberal institutions, universities seem to always be the most capitalistic in nature.

From the courses on MIT OCW it seems that MIT uses only open-source IDEs and languages, like GNU C or Python.

[bommel]

You can implement column-major ordering in any language, since it's just a way to calculate indexing.

But the internals shouldn't matter anyway if the Matlab API is at all sane.

yes but my library doesn't natively support the CSC format used by Matlab. I have no problem with Matlab's ordering scheme in general but it makes my current task quite complicated.