Next message: Fred Hebard: "Re: Beginner"
George,
You missed one important class of programs in your evaluation, which
are the ultra high-level math/science packages such as Matlab,
Mathematica, Maple, Scilab, etc. As Dan Allen pointed out, standard
computer languages such as Python, Perl, C, Fortran, Basic, Java, etc,
can do anything and do it faster, but then so can Assembler do it
faster than standard languages. The ultra-high-level packages are much
easier to learn, much faster and more compact to program, much easier
to document, have built-in graphics, and are fast enough for all but
extremely compute-intensive problems. In this latter regard, I expect
they'd even be suitable for solving three-body problems, etc.
Extremely compute-intensive problems are things such as massive weather
simulations that run on super computers of various sorts.
Fred
