Building "serious" scientific applications with RunRev...

[Alex Rice]

On Saturday, November 9, 2002, at 08:26  AM, Oliver Hardt wrote:

> i do not agree with the general statement "if you want to program a 
> serious scientific app, you better learn C".  from my experience that 
> is true only for some problems.  for example, if you would like to 
> analyze fMRI data with an algorithm of your own, well, you'll better 
> learn C.  and sometimes you need structures (struct in C, record in 
> pascal) in order to model more complex data, then C or pascal is the 
> better choice (for example if you want to do some complex modelling). 
> but RR can be used successfully for scientific applications -- i am an 
> experimental psychologist and use it nearly everyday:  i prepare my 
> data for later analysis (clean up files, merge data, rearrange files), 
> create my experiments, manage some databases.  it probably isn't the 
> best tool to do 3d live rendering, but about that i am not sure.  on 
> the other hand, perhaps the stuff i do is not considered "serious" 
> science ...

I wasn't at all suggesting that if it's not written in C, it's not 
"serious" science. I was just pointing out that there are very refined, 
fast C libraries for specific purposes that one would not want to 
rewrite. Matlab, & OpenGL are a couple that come to mind for the 
original poster.

Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at swcp.com
alex_rice at arc.to