Re: Scientific calculations (was Re: Ada vs Delphi? )

["Vladimir Olensky" <vladimir_olensky@yahoo.com>]

Robert Dewar wrote in message <7os9j4$fs7$1@nnrp1.deja.com>...
>In article <rr2f32q3krl93@corp.supernews.com>,
>  "Vladimir Olensky" <vladimir_olensky@yahoo.com> wrote:
>> My favorite one is MathCad Professional.  It can do almost
>everything
>> including powerful symbolic calculations (very powerful AI
>feature) and it's
>> own programming as well as visualisation of the results using
>OpenGL.
>
>Actually I would draw a parallel here between thinking all
>scientific calculations can be done using MathCad, with thinking
>that all Fiscal processing in the IS area can be done using
>high level fourth generation programming languages.



You probably did not understood the idea of my post.
The point is not that  MathCad, Maple or Mathematica  can always "replace
conventional programming languages for 'scientific programming' ". There is
also difference between engineering domain and scientific domain. Some tools
are purely engineering - AutoCad,PCAD, Electronic Workbench etc., some
others  mentioned above cover both (but not totally). There is no universal
tool for all of course.

The point is that if there exist specialized tools there is no need to
reinvent the wheel.
First try these tools and  only then decide if you need to spend time and
efforts to do anything additional (and here you may use any conventional
programming language -C, Ada, Pascal etc.)
Idea is that one should use right tools for right job.

As I mentioned earlier these tools are easily extensible (in the field of
numeric calculations) using external libraries (there are a lot of them in
almost any field). New ones  appear in time. One of  them that is worth
mentioning is wavelet pack (wavelet transforms is new revolutionary thing
that comes from theoretical studies to real life  and soon will change a lot
of things in signal processing - e.g. data compressing, image processing
etc.)
Also there are great number of ready to use solutions to  many problems in
engineering and scientific domains.

As I mentioned one of  the main powers of Maple, MathCad is the very
powerful engine for symbolic calculations.
This AI feature is extremely expressive.
First you can  find the symbolic solution of the problem and then use
numeric calculations.

Taking into account your comments I might think that you probably are not
very familiar with these tools or did not use them much.


Regards.