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Numerical Recipes Article [message #10273]

Mon, 03 November 1997 00:00

Wayne Landsman
Messages: 117
Registered: January 1997

Senior Member

There is a very engaging article by William Press and Saul Teukolsky
titled "Numerical Recipes: Does this Paradigm have a Future?" in the
September/October issue of "Computers in Physics" magazine. The
article may be of interest to IDL users, both because "Numerical
Recipes" is the main math library within IDL, and because the authors
use examples of IDL coding in their article. In one example, they
compare a "sort and select" algorithm, as coded in Fortran 77, Fortran
90, Mathematica, and IDL. The IDL code clearly wins out in terms of
readability and simplicity -- they call it "almost crystaline in its
clarity". On the other hand, the criticize IDL for its lack of
"scalability" -- code that works with small arrays, may not work with
large arrays, because of speed or memory limitations.

Other interesting sections include a discussion of why they haven't
released a version of "Numerical Recipes" for C++, and their effective
reply to the professional numerical analysts who criticize them for not
using state of the art techniques.

--Wayne Landsman landsman@mpb.gsfc.nasa.gov

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[Message index]

		Numerical Recipes Article By: Wayne Landsman on Mon, 03 November 1997 00:00
		Re: Numerical Recipes Article By: Paul E Howland on Mon, 10 November 1997 00:00
		Re: Numerical Recipes Article By: David Foster on Fri, 07 November 1997 00:00

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