Math Forum Discussions

Ian Searle

Posts: 3
Registered: 12/7/04

Announcement: Rlab-2 beta available
Posted: Jul 7, 1996 1:53 PM

Plain Text

Rlab2 Beta Available

Rlab2 is an evolution of Rlab (or Rlab1). In case you are not familar
with Rlab1 it is a very high level language for scientific/engineering
applications. Rlab is _not_ a clone of the Matlab language. Although it
offers similar mathematical operations on numeric objects
(+,-,*,.*,/,./,^,.^,',.', etc...) The languaage syntax and semantics
have been "improved" to offer a more consistent and powerful programming
environment (IMHO). In addition to global and locally scoped variables,
there is a file-static scoped variable (this includes functions).
Multiple functions, and mixtures of statements and functions may be
combined in a single file. A N-dimensional associative array structure
has been also been added.

Rlab2 is mostly upwardly compatible with Rlab1. Noticeable changes are:

Sparse matrix storage is now available. This is not yet
complete in the beta version, ECD is soon.

Improved performance

Nearly complete reference manual in HTML and Postscript formats.

Less noticeable changes are:

Overhaul of the interpreter - class interface. This makes
adding a new data type conceivable

Use of Boehm's generational garbage collector. Performance
has improved because of this, and the probability of encountering
a memory leak is _very_ small.

Internally, object management has been improved allowing for
more efficient use/re-use of multiple instance of the same
object.

This version has been in testing for over 6 months now. But, I still
consider it beta as the sparse matrix class and the reference manual
are not yet complete. At present it is available at:

http://www.eskimo.com/~ians/rlab.html
ftp://www.eskimo.com/u/i/ians/rlab/sources/rlab-2.0b12.tar.gz

Rlab2 will be at the Main ftp site soon.

ftp://mirriwinni.cse.rmit.edu.au/pub/rlab

If you have not used, or built Rlab before, be sure to see the web-page,
for pointers to the LAPACK, BLAS, FFTPACK, RANLIB, PLPLOT, and Gnuplot
libraries and packages.

Cheers,
--
-Ian Searle
ians@eskimo.com
http://www.eskimo.com/~ians