On Tuesday 30 September 2008 08:40:51 Mitchell, Neil wrote:
Hi,
For libraries F# is probably superior to all, as it has libraries for virtually everything, and can interoperate seamlessly with COM and .NET. I doubt there will be any library functionality that can't be found or bought.
Although the .NET platform is general purpose by design it is actually only used in quite specific domains (primarily web and database). Technical computing is one domain where .NET is rarely used (it is about as popular as OCaml in this context) and, unsurprisingly, the libraries available for .NET are not great for this. In contrast, OCaml has mature bindings to BLAS, LAPACK and FFTW as well as bindings to GSL and many other libraries have been written natively in OCaml. This is why we started two products that are designed to provide to F# customers similar capabilities to those already available for free to OCaml users. -- Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e