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Postings from August 2000
I am little bit confused and probably very ignorant but one thing seems to me very useful. Why doesn't perl support a new data type matrix. If perl wants to become a real "programming language" not just a scripting language it should support number crunching internally in a more intuitive way. I don't know if this is suggested before but until now the messages I read mentioned only making perl arrays consistant with pdl arrays. Instead of trying to apply the syntax of perl arrays and variables, why not just have new type such as matrix internally supported by perl and have a new prefix for it such as ^ (I guess most of the good ones are taken). So instead of confusing ourself with $matrix, we can have ^matrix and it is more readable. I know that Larry Wall and most other people who worked on designing perl didn't have the need of multidimensional matrices and they didn't add this to perl that time and they didn't try to optimize it as in the case of regular expressions. But many people in the academia work on number crunching and they use matlab or similar solutions for high level and C for low level. Recently there is great interest for the functional languages such as ML and Haskell also (I am not familiar with them though). This people think that perl is very inefficient for number crunching since they think in terms of perl arrays not pdl arrays. But pdl arrays doesn't exist in my default perl installation??? Why would I try to discover them? I know most people here are more knowledgable than me and probably thought about this before. My feeling is that most perl users were coming from system admin and text processing background (which perl is written for), and the rest of the programmers end up thinking that perl is not good enough for number crunching and they don't even bother with it. If my default installation doesn't have some functionality like PDL how would you convince me easily that perl would be useful for my programming needs. So make things easy (to install, to use, to implement). Baris.Thread Next