GUI tookit for science and education

[Robert Kern]

John Hunter wrote:
>>>>>>"Robert" == Robert Kern <rkern at ucsd.edu> writes:
> 
> 
>     Robert>    H = U*D*V.T
> 
>     Robert> then I'm more than happy with that tradeoff. The small
>     Robert> syntactic conveniences MATLAB provides are dwarfed by the
>     Robert> intrinsic power of Python.
> 
> Of course, U*D*V (transpose omitted for clarity) is the classic
> problem for an interpreted language: the creation of temporaries.
> weave allows you, via blitz, to do chained matrix/matrix operations
> without multiple passes through the loop and w/o temporaries by
> run-time compilation and linking of extension code.  Perhap's the OP's
> reference to JIT is referring to a just in time compilation mechanism
> in matlab, similar to weave's.  They've already discovered LAPACK and
> FFTW; it wouldn't be surprising if they solved blitzm (blitz in
> matlab), antialiasing, alpha transparency and multiple colormaps per
> figure in upcoming releases.

I don't think so, although it is incredibly, ridiculously difficult to 
find information about what the JIT actually *does*. The best my 
Google-fu can do is this:

http://www.mathworks.com/access/helpdesk_r13/help/techdoc/matlab_prog/ch7_per6.html#773530

It looks like they're primarily improving simple for loops and doing 
arithmetic with emitted machine code in order to speed up those 
operations that simply can't be "vectorized." They *might* be doing 
something smart with array expressions wrt temporaries, but they don't 
say. google("MATLAB JIT temporaries") gives nothing interesting.

-- 
Robert Kern
rkern at ucsd.edu

"In the fields of hell where the grass grows high
  Are the graves of dreams allowed to die."
   -- Richard Harter