On Tuesday, January 21, 2014 05:32:13 AM Hans W Borchers wrote: > When you say, Calculus is not developed much at the moment, > maybe it's too early for me to change.
Writing finite-differencing algorithms isn't that hard. That should not be a make-or-break issue for your decision about whether to use Julia. But don't underestimate the automatic differentiation facilities that have recently been added to Julia (https://github.com/scidom/DualNumbers.jl). Basically, AD computes numerical derivatives without the roundoff error, by defining a new numerical type that behaves somewhat similarly to complex numbers but extracts the first derivative exactly. The key point is that it is a _numerical_ approach, so it doesn't rely on anything symbolic. The one place you can't use AD is when your function relies on calling out to C (because C doesn't know about Julia's Dual type). But any function defined in Julia, including special functions like elliptic integrals, etc, should be fine. For higher-order derivatives, you can do similar things with even more fancy numerical types. Perhaps the new PowerSeries already does this? (I haven't looked.) --Tim
