Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 13:06:51 +0200 From: Jerzy Karczmarczuk
Michael Vanier comments my defense of Matlab:
I used objects, and even a lot of functional constructs. I don't see any reason to call it a creeping horror. It is quite homogeneous and simple, and is decently interfaced.
It's incredibly inconsistent. To cite just one example, the syntax is geared towards the notion that "everything is a two-dimensional matrices of double-precision floating point numbers". If you want to have a three-dimensional array, you can do that, but the syntax is not going to be nearly as elegant, because matlab's array syntax doesn't scale at all.
Come on... Matlab has cells and the full object-oriented layer nowadays. There are short ints, strings, complex numbers, etc. The extensibility is good. The overall consistency is reasonable.
Syntax for 3D arrays? Give me one single language where this is natural and immediate. We are 2D readers/writers, our way of presenting information is 2D within a text editor, and similar problems hit everywhere. I used 3D matrices for the image synthesis, for colour image processing, for simulations of physical systems. It wasn't worse, and even better than in many other languages.
Python: # 2-d array: print a[0][0] # 3-d array: print a[0][0][0] This also applies to most languages, including C. If you like matlab, go right ahead and use it. The same goes for Visual Basic. I could care less what programming languages you use. But if you think matlab is an elegant language, we will have to agree to disagree. And that is the last word I will say on this subject, since this is a Haskell mailing list. Mike