Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3?

[mockturtle <framefritti@gmail.com>]

On Jul 19, 3:04 am, Andrew Reilly <andrew-newsp...@areilly.bpc-
users.org> wrote:
> On Sat, 18 Jul 2009 16:19:40 +0200, Andrea Taverna wrote:
> > So I have considered these alternatives: FreePascal, Eiffel, Ada and
> > Modula-3.
> > I have taken a look at all of them and I'm still undecided. Below are
> > the impressions I got for each language. Can you help me? Feel free to
> > recommend other languages as well.
>
(snip)
>
> 1: how fast is fast enough?  Will you be waiting weeks for a run to
> complete, or will you be coding for weeks and then running for ten
> minutes?  If the latter, something more expressive but perhaps a little
> further from "speed of light" ASM might be more helpful.  Also, if your
> code will be spending most of its time in optimized library matrix
> algebra code (eg atlas) then it doesn't matter much how the language
> itself fares.  (eg Matlab is slow but expressive unless you use it as a
> wrapper around BLAS/LAPAC, in which case it's hard to get close to.)
>

Just my 2c...

If you need to do heavy number-crunching, I would suggest Matlab or
its open-source brother Octave (http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/).
My main professional interests are in DSP and the three languages that
I use most are Matlab (for number-crunching problems) and Ruby (for
F&D scripts and/or text processing) and Ada (for everything else).
Since Matlab is not compiled, you do not reach the full theoretical
computational speed that you could achieve with your computer, but if
you write your code with a little care (that is, avoiding loops and
trying to write your problem as "vectorized" as possible) you can
achieve very good performances (your mileage can vary depend on your
specific problem, though).   The advantage of Matlab/Octave is that
you have a very large library of numerical algorithm and development
can be quite fast.  On the cons side, since it is easy to write "fast
and dirty" matlab scripts, matlab code can turn out more difficult to
mantain (this depends on your "style" too).

Hope this helps.