Re: [boost] different matrix library?

Subject: Re: [boost] different matrix library?
From: Rutger ter Borg (rutger_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-08-17 06:26:42

joel wrote:

> As I told earlier in this thread, NT2 was designed to help scientist
> whose main tools was Matlab to port their prototype onto parallel
> machines. Hence the matlab like syntax. Check what we said we Edward a bit
> before: C++ user may be able to use a more C++ interface, scientist -
> which is for me main target audience- won't. So the Matlab interface is
> something to stay cause no physicist that sometimes don't even know about
> C++ idioms or lingua will take the time to learn about. They want a tool
> that allow fast porting of their Matlab or mapple or mathematica
> prototype. And they don't even want to know about fancy CPU or GPU or
> clusters. This has to be transparent to us. Matlab is maybe ugly
> soemtimes but it gets the job done. Me and my coworker had the chance to
> be right next the users of our library and when I look at the code
> written with NT2, I maybe can see 1 or 2 that after doign matlab like
> for pages switch to STL interface cause they need to feed something to a
> iostream_iterator or w/e. For me, in this case of library design, you
> have to listen to users, and users want matlab interface.

I thought R, http://www.r-project.org/, is a popular tool in science, too. 

I'm not that convinced a C++ library needs to have a Matlab-like syntax so 
it can easily understood by users coming from Matlab. A translator would do 
the trick, too.

I'm certainly interested in such a library, but I'm not sure if Boost would 
be the right forum for it (but let's leave that to the other Boosters).

>> Of course :-) A DSL is not written overnight, either. Perhaps setting
>> up a .qbk in the sandbox would be useful for this purpose?
> You mean ? A tutorial on writting DSL ?

Coming up with a DSL-syntax for a C++ linear algebra library.

Cheers,

Rutger