Python advocacy in scientific computation

[Alex Martelli]

sturlamolden <sturlamolden at yahoo.no> wrote:

> just a toy. And as Matlab's run-time does reference counting insted of
> proper garbage collection, any datastructure more complex than arrays
> are sure to leak memory (I believe Python also suffered from this as
> some point).

Yes, that was fixed in the move from 1.5.2 to 2.0 (I don't recall if the
intermediate short-lived 1.6 also fixed it, but nobody used that
anyway;-).

> Matlab is not useful for anything except plotting data
> quickly. And as for the expensive license, I am not sure its worth it.
> I have been considering a move to Scilab for some time, but it too
> carries the burden of working with a flawed language.

There was a pyscilab once, still around at
<http://pdilib.sourceforge.net/>, but I don't think it ever matured
beyond a "proof of concept" release 0.1 or something.


Alex