From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FORGED_GMAIL_RCVD, FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 5b1e799cdb,3ef3e78eacf6f938 X-Google-Attributes: gid5b1e799cdb,public,usenet X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news2.google.com!postnews.google.com!o15g2000yqm.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: mockturtle Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.modula3,comp.programming Subject: Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3? Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 06:14:46 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: <041177f1-e8d7-4d34-8b3e-b9276effc2d6@o15g2000yqm.googlegroups.com> References: <7cf9peF2758tgU1@mid.individual.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 93.37.245.91 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1248009286 19973 127.0.0.1 (19 Jul 2009 13:14:46 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:14:46 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: o15g2000yqm.googlegroups.com; posting-host=93.37.245.91; posting-account=9fwclgkAAAD6oQ5usUYhee1l39geVY99 User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Opera/9.64 (X11; Linux i686; U; en) Presto/2.1.1,gzip(gfe),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.eiffel:309 comp.lang.ada:7147 comp.lang.modula3:35 comp.programming:11823 Date: 2009-07-19T06:14:46-07:00 List-Id: On Jul 19, 3:04=A0am, Andrew Reilly 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? =A0Will you be waiting weeks for a run to > complete, or will you be coding for weeks and then running for ten > minutes? =A0If the latter, something more expressive but perhaps a little > further from "speed of light" ASM might be more helpful. =A0Also, 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. =A0(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.