On Tue, Sep 23, 2008 at 5:04 PM, Don Stewart <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

>
> Would this collapse to just using matrix library bindings? I.e.
> lapack, fftw, blas...
>
> I'd use, e.g.,
>
>    http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/hmatrix
>    http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/fft
>

NO! . Actually the real challenge is in doing it from scratch.  or enabling
it.
It may not be prudent to expect some one demonstrating their proficiency
in/love for a particular functional language to also be a master at
numerical Algos.
but  break it down into something simpler.
1. represent a Matrix.
2. Marshall a Matrix to and from disk.
3. element wise operations
4. row operations
5. col operations
6. Matrix operations [ even simple ops like eye,ones, zeros,  multiply,
transpose ]
this would lay the foundation for more complex algos.  or may be some one
will come up with a much better set of primitives that suits the functional
mindset better !!

it is a kind of folk lore that Haskell is not for numerically heavy code, do
it in C and use FFI.  Well has any one tried? and proved beyond doubt that
FFI is the only way to go?  some FFI may be end up being necessary but lower
the level it is at, the better:)  kind of like Data.ByteString  although the
actual packed string may be  native, since there is a List interface,
operations are in Haskell. but with hmatrix etc..  the operations are also
native, we get an interface to those too. nothing wrong with using that!!
just that trying to do it cleanly in Haskell, or another language might be a
good thing.

I believe it would be much easier to understand and tweak algorithms like
SVD in a functional language.  just look at clapack's dgesvd_.  its just an
f2c from the Fortran version.  of course there are other implementations to
be found too. but i figured an original attempt in a functional language
would help.


>
> Another idea for a code-off, that we did up here in Portland, is to
> parallelise the shootout entries for your favourite language,
>
>    http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=all&lang=all
>
>
This is great too.

thanks
cheers
Ram

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