On Jan 2, 2007, at 6:44 AM, Björn Helgason wrote:
Matlab is good at making simple Plots.
As well as exquisitely complex plots. The graphics package is a very compelling reason to use it in engineering design work.
On Jan 2, 2007, at 8:30 AM, John Randall wrote:
and there are "toolkits" which allow a novice to immediately solve practical problems of interest in these domains.
John hit the nail on the head: Matlab and its 2-D graphical modeling extension, Simulink, are engineering design and development environments. J is a language.
The availability of special-purpose extension packages or "toolkits" motivates many engineers to use Matlab. Simulink facilitates design of control systems and circuits using graphical models composed of functional "blocks" and many third party "blocksets" extend the modeling capabilities of Simulink. For example, a blockset I regularly use helps me create hierarchical models of complex digital logic designs. And with a push of a GUI button I can compile a model into a binary file that will program an instantiation in a multiple- million gate logic device. Now how cool is that?
I use J for system level analysis and Monte Carlo simulation, i.e., at a level where the thinking is relatively abstract and it's not necessary or useful to model all of the fine details and constraints of a hardware implementation. I could use Matlab for this (and must if I need to convey the program to other engineers) but I prefer J because it is so terse. My last J simulation spanned one notebook page; the Matlab code I used to plot the results for presentation spanned three and a half.
-Steve Kolek---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
