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ATLAS and BLAS are What you probably meant was that ATLAS and BLAS are implementations of the right way, not the way itself. Because the alternative would be r

by gngeal 13y ago

ATLAS and BLAS are What you probably meant was that ATLAS and BLAS are implementations of the right way, not the way itself. Because the alternative would be really, really sad.

moomin 13y ago
Actually, I meant that, for most of us, using ATLAS or BLAS is superior to any implementation of our own. I'll allow exceptions for people who have unusual requirements or a phenomenal amount of skill.
- gngeal 13y ago
  I may be mistaken, but don't ATLAS, BLAS, LINPACK etc. only operate on single and double precision floats? What if the elements you're operating on are, say, rationals or polynomials? Somehow it seemed to me that linear algebra is a somewhat more abstract concept than what Fortran numerical libraries usually tend to implement. Also, the drawback of anything written in this way is that it doesn't compose well. The individual operations may well have been optimized into oblivion, but their composition may not necessarily be what you'd like it to be. One can also say goodbye to higher-order functions. But I'm not exactly a Fortran person when it comes to code style, so I may be prejudiced against overly loopy code. (BTW, am I the only one who thinks that the Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/math-atlas/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/math-atlas/) comments are machine-generated? I mean, comments like "An essential Windows program." or "The best program that I've ever used." are hardly what I'd expect for a numerical library.)
  - moomin 13y ago
    True. I guess I was putting rationals et al under "unusual requirements". Happy to accept they're not as unusual as I think. Composability is a huge issue: I think the whole reason SciPy exists is to provide an interoperability standard for this sort of work. That said, I think your average scientist can more intuitively see ways of composing _using_ matrices than the rest of us. (Checks the Sourceforge reviews. ROTFL. What's the purpose of this spam?)

by gngeal 13y ago

ATLAS and BLAS are What you probably meant was that ATLAS and BLAS are implementations of the right way, not the way itself. Because the alternative would be really, really sad.

moomin 13y ago

Actually, I meant that, for most of us, using ATLAS or BLAS is superior to any implementation of our own. I'll allow exceptions for people who have unusual requirements or a phenomenal amount of skill.

gngeal 13y ago
I may be mistaken, but don't ATLAS, BLAS, LINPACK etc. only operate on single and double precision floats? What if the elements you're operating on are, say, rationals or polynomials? Somehow it seemed to me that linear algebra is a somewhat more abstract concept than what Fortran numerical libraries usually tend to implement. Also, the drawback of anything written in this way is that it doesn't compose well. The individual operations may well have been optimized into oblivion, but their composition may not necessarily be what you'd like it to be. One can also say goodbye to higher-order functions. But I'm not exactly a Fortran person when it comes to code style, so I may be prejudiced against overly loopy code. (BTW, am I the only one who thinks that the Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/math-atlas/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/math-atlas/) comments are machine-generated? I mean, comments like "An essential Windows program." or "The best program that I've ever used." are hardly what I'd expect for a numerical library.)
- moomin 13y ago
  True. I guess I was putting rationals et al under "unusual requirements". Happy to accept they're not as unusual as I think. Composability is a huge issue: I think the whole reason SciPy exists is to provide an interoperability standard for this sort of work. That said, I think your average scientist can more intuitively see ways of composing _using_ matrices than the rest of us. (Checks the Sourceforge reviews. ROTFL. What's the purpose of this spam?)