Python and Math

[Chris Angelico]

On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 1:13 PM, Bill Cunningham <nospam at nspam.invalid> wrote:
>     Does Python have good mathematical capabilities? I am interested in
> learning a second language for mathematical purposes. I am considering
> looking at python, perl, fortran, Adas out. It looked too complicated to
> learn. Perl looked easy and I haven't really looked into python.

Absolutely it does! In the built-in types, your integer has arbitrary
precision, and there is an arbitrary-precision Decimal type in the
standard library. There is also, naturally, a standard set of trig
functions and so on. With additional libraries, you can get numeric
and scientific functionality (lots of which is written in Fortran, as
I understand it), giving incredibly high performance for a high level
language; look into SciPy and NumPy. Strongly recommend Python for
numeric work.

ChrisA