Larry Wall wrote:
>
> Karl Glazebrook writes:
> : I have a lot of respect for Larry, but as a scientist I distrust all this
> : deference to one single authority.
>
> Well, sure, but someone still has to decide who gets the grants. :-)
But it's not always the same person.
> : I don't know if Larry has any experience in scientific programming of the
> : sort PDL tries to address.
>
> All the more reason to write good RFCs. I like to think I'm pretty
> sharp, and can at least fake a good understanding of math. On the
> subject of experience I can tell you that I've gone so far as to solve
> simultaneous equations with matrices. But I will guarantee you that if
> you can't make me understand what you want, you won't be able to make
> most Perl programmers understand it. If it comes down to that, I can
> at least get you some syntactic relief, but I certainly won't go as far
> as to inflict higher math on the average programmer. Perl has always
> been intended to be a multi-paradigmatic language, which means I don't
> mind supporting theoretical abstractions as long as they don't get in
> the way of mere mortals.
The plan is not to inflict higher map but to provide some simply
multidimensional array conveniences - compactly stored arrays,
which can be manipulated en masse arithmetically (@a * 3 or
equivalent), and a convenient multidimensional slicing notation.
Given that most of the scientific stuff can be done in modules.
> That being said, I wouldn't mind if Perl became the language of choice
> for scientific programming. More generally, for all X, I wouldn't mind
> if Perl became the language of choice for X.
Me too
Karl
