PHILOSOPHY(1) User Contributed Perl Documentation PHILOSOPHY(1)NAMEPDL::Philosophy-- what's behind PDL?
DESCRIPTION
This is an attempt to summarize some of the common spirit between pdl
developers in order to answer the question "Why PDL"? If you are a PDL
developer and I haven't caught your favorite ideas about PDL, please
let me know!
An often-asked question is: Why not settle for some of the existing
systems like Matlab or IDL or GnuPlot or whatever?
Major ideas
The first tenet of our philosophy is the "free software" idea: software
being free has several advantages (less bugs because more people see
the code, you can have the source and port it to your own working
environment with you, ... and of course, that you don't need to pay
anything).
The second idea is a pet peeve of many: many languages like matlab are
pretty well suited for their specific tasks but for a different
application, you need to change to an entirely different tool and
regear yourself mentally. Not to speak about doing an application that
does two things at once... Because we use Perl, we have the power and
ease of perl syntax, regular expressions, hash tables etc at our
fingertips at all times. By extending an existing language, we start
from a much healthier base than languages like matlab which have grown
into existence from a very small functionality at first and expanded
little by little, making things look badly planned. We stand by the
Perl sayings: "simple things should be simple but complicated things
should be possible" and "There is more than one way to do it"
(TIMTOWTDI).
The third idea is interoperability: we want to be able to use PDL to
drive as many tools as possible, we can connect to OpenGL or Mesa for
graphics or whatever. There isn't anything out there that's really
satisfactory as a tool and can do everything we want easily. And be
portable.
The fourth idea is related to PDL::PP and is Tuomas's personal
favorite: code should only specify as little as possible redundant
info. If you find yourself writing very similar-looking code much of
the time, all that code could probably be generated by a simple perl
script. The PDL C preprocessor takes this to an extreme.
Minor goals and purposes
We want speed. Optimally, it should ultimately (e.g. with the Perl
compiler) be possible to compile PDL::PP subs to C and obtain the top
vectorized speeds on supercomputers. Also, we want to be able to
calculate things at near top speed from inside perl, by using dataflow
to avoid memory allocation and deallocation (the overhead should
ultimately be only a little over one indirect function call plus couple
of ifs per function in the pipe).
We want handy syntax. Want to do something and cannot do it easily?
Tell us about it...
We want lots of goodies. A good mathematical library etc.
AUTHORCopyright(C) 1997 Tuomas J. Lukka (lukka@fas.harvard.edu).
Redistribution in the same form is allowed but reprinting requires a
permission from the author.
perl v5.10.0 1999-12-09 PHILOSOPHY(1)