3 ms·

In bringing up CPAN, the other poster's point might have been that Matlab/Python/Octave don't generally contain native implementations of these either. A lot of

In bringing up CPAN, the other poster's point might have been that Matlab/Python/Octave don't generally contain native implementations of these either. A lot of Matlab and NumPy is wrapper around BLAS/ATLAS, for example. One could do the same with Perl, and in fact, people have. If you need random variates from a Type 2 Gumbel distribution, for example, Math::GSL::Randist has you covered https://metacpan.org/pod/Math::GSL::Randist#Gumbel https://metacpan.org/pod/Math::GSL::Randist#Gumbel Honestly, I'm not rushing to convert our stuff to PDL, but I did want to push back a little on the idea that python is The One True Way to do scientific computing. It's a fine language, but I think a lot of its specific benefits are overstated (or mixed in with the general idea of taking computing seriously).

sivoais 5y ago
Yep, there's more than one way to do things and PDL wraps all the same GSL functions <https://metacpan.org/pod/PDL::GSL::RNG#ran_gumbel1 https://metacpan.org/pod/PDL::GSL::RNG#ran_gumbel1>. Also note that PDL does automatic broadcasting of input variables so it does an entire C loop for an array of values being evaluated. See this example <https://gist.github.com/zmughal/fd79961a166d653a7316aef2f010a1a2 https://gist.github.com/zmughal/fd79961a166d653a7316aef2f010...> for how that applies to all GSL functions that are available in PDL. Though I do notice that some of the distributions available at <https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/stats.html#continuous-distributions https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/stats.html#contin...> are not in GSL. Though when I do stats, I often reach for R and have done some work in the past to make PDL work with the R interpreter (it currently has some build bitrot and I need to fix that).

3 ms·

In bringing up CPAN, the other poster's point might have been that Matlab/Python/Octave don't generally contain native implementations of these either. A lot of

by mattkrause 5y ago

sivoais 5y ago
Yep, there's more than one way to do things and PDL wraps all the same GSL functions <https://metacpan.org/pod/PDL::GSL::RNG#ran_gumbel1 https://metacpan.org/pod/PDL::GSL::RNG#ran_gumbel1>. Also note that PDL does automatic broadcasting of input variables so it does an entire C loop for an array of values being evaluated. See this example <https://gist.github.com/zmughal/fd79961a166d653a7316aef2f010a1a2 https://gist.github.com/zmughal/fd79961a166d653a7316aef2f010...> for how that applies to all GSL functions that are available in PDL. Though I do notice that some of the distributions available at <https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/stats.html#continuous-distributions https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/stats.html#contin...> are not in GSL. Though when I do stats, I often reach for R and have done some work in the past to make PDL work with the R interpreter (it currently has some build bitrot and I need to fix that).