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=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,2b9375ec36b47df4 X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII Path: g2news1.google.com!postnews.google.com!t10g2000yqg.googlegroups.com!not-for-mail From: Ada novice Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: books on numerical programming in Ada Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 03:41:14 -0700 (PDT) Organization: http://groups.google.com Message-ID: References: <5833b88b-a61e-4a8d-b4ed-c877f1eac7a1@g35g2000yqa.googlegroups.com> <4c4b35b2$0$2375$4d3efbfe@news.sover.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: 193.11.22.91 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable X-Trace: posting.google.com 1280054474 18357 127.0.0.1 (25 Jul 2010 10:41:14 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 25 Jul 2010 10:41:14 +0000 (UTC) Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com Injection-Info: t10g2000yqg.googlegroups.com; posting-host=193.11.22.91; posting-account=Rr9I-QoAAACS-nOzpA-mGxtAlZ46Nb6I User-Agent: G2/1.0 X-HTTP-UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729),gzip(gfe) Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:12538 Date: 2010-07-25T03:41:14-07:00 List-Id: On Jul 24, 8:49=A0pm, "Peter C. Chapin" wrote: Would any good book on numerical > methods be good enough? The translation into some programming language > (such as Ada) might be an "implementation detail." > > Peter Thanks. Yes I agree that if one learns numerical methods well then implementing these methods in any programming language would only require some knowledge of that language. I'm a mechanical engineer and not a computer guru. A mechanical engineer doesn't usually know about software engineering methods and at times won't know what data type would best represent some entity. Records for example are quite seldom used by people other than computer programmers but yet records can represent some entities far better than some other data type. In the book: Ada for Software Engineers by Mordechai Ben-Ari, I saw an implementation of the Euler method in solving an ODE and I would never have thought of designing such an implementation. And I'm still studying it. So, computer programmers typically will know the best way to code the solution for a given problem. This is why it's far better to study a book (dealing with numerical methods) which has been written by a computer programmer. Though one can expect that the computer programmer won't go too deep in the numerical algorithms themselves, one will surely learn a lot on how to think like a computer programmer when faced with more demanding implementation tasks. And having a good textbook on numerical analysis is a necessity. I have seen other books in other programming languages written by engineers other than in the field of computer science. These books typically won't contain the most efficient implementation nor will use the best data types to represent a given entity. Many of engineers involved with numerical calculations still keep their own Fortran mentality and when they write a programming book in C for example, you can easily see how the C codes seem to be a mere line by line translation of some Fortran codes. YC