J Users, Good morning. I've been looking into Array Based Languages for work I'm doing with large arrays of binary data. Currently, our lab uses a proprietary 4GL library for number crunching. My thought was to get feedback on the possibility of switching over to an open source library like J. The software would be Windows based, just like our current package.
Presently, I wrap the entire proprietary system with a Visual Studio based interface, due to the clunkiness of the library using Windows. The library we use is geared towards OpenVMS and Linux; we chose it due to are previous VMS platform. The software I've develop reads in mixed binary and text data files containing large arrays of data. The data used to be integer with at most 8 parameters in one direction and up to a million events for each parameter (2 x 8 x 1000000 or up to 15 MB per file). Now, however, the data is moving into floating point with many more parameters and event counts. Would J be suitable for arrays of this size? I split off the parameters into single dimension arrays throughout the code. Arrays are combined, multiplied, masked and filtered then displayed as histograms, dot plots and contours. From the literature on J, this all seems to be within scope. One CPU intensive routine we employ is Cluster Analysis using a K-Means algorithm to find cluster centroids. In addition to the wrapper I wrote around the current library, I've also written an IDE for development and testing purposes. Our library is basically a console program with Windows Event handling added. It appears that J is also a console based environment which may be easily incorporated into my IDE. Currently, I handle the creation of the process running the proprietary code by .NET process functions and output redirection. Anyway, any thoughts or suggestions on the use of J in this endeavor would be appreciated. I've also looked into the statistical package "R" (what's with the letters, you know it is hard to search on google with simply a letter, perhaps "xyzzy" would be more unique). Sincerely, dgp ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
