Re: Building "serious" scientific applications with RunRev...

[Michael J. Lew]

Absolutely!

I use Revolution as my ONLY programming tool for both teaching and scientific applications (and sometimes both combined in a single project). I have built several projects using matrix algorithms from the "Numerical Recipes" book (Press et al.) and facilitated that by making a fortran and pascal to transcript (partial) converters. Specific programs that work well are a partial differential equation-based numerical simulation system (both Runge-Kutta and Rosenbrock stiff integration routines), a statistical program that does simple Student's t-tests and the more widely appropriate permutations tests, a not-quite perfect (yet) curve-fitting program along with a wide variety of other smaller applications.

Relevant built-in functions in Revolution make the building these types of routines quite straightforward. For instance the random() function returns reliably random numbers that have no bias or correlation. I recommend that if you are already familiar with Revolution then you should have no qualms concerning its applicability to scientific computing problems.

I can't comment specifically on imaging, psychophysical or colour projects, but I'd certainly give it a go in Revolution before trying to deal with C. My programs are generally a bit slower in execution than commercial programs with similar functionality, but they are certainly fast enough for my purposes and the speed difference is nowhere near great enough to counterbalance the time that learning C might take.

Regards,
--
Michael J. Lew

Senior Lecturer
Department of Pharmacology
The University of Melbourne
Parkville 3010
Victoria
Australia

Phone +613 8344 8304

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