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=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,FREEMAIL_FROM, INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,c7f5c70275787af8 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: "Vladimir Olensky" Subject: Re: Scientific calculations (was Re: Ada vs Delphi? ) Date: 1999/08/11 Message-ID: #1/1 X-Deja-AN: 511556909 References: <37ab421a.5414989@news.total.net> <37ab8bd1.0@news.pacifier.com> <37ae1fc8.653954@news.clara.net> <7os9j4$fs7$1@nnrp1.deja.com> Organization: Posted via Supernews, http://www.supernews.com X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V4.72.3110.3 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada X-Complaints-To: newsabuse@supernews.com Date: 1999-08-11T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: Robert Dewar wrote in message <7os9j4$fs7$1@nnrp1.deja.com>... >In article , > "Vladimir Olensky" 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.