[open-axiom-devel] Comparison of Spad, Boot, Reduce and Common Lisp for numerical computation
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From: Bill P. <bil...@ne...> - 2009-03-25 13:04:46
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Dear panAxiom Developers, On the Axiom-Wiki website at http://axiom-wiki.newsynthesis.org/SandBoxFisher Mark Clements writes: "How useful are the different CAS languages for implementing numerical routines? Prompted by a comparison of R and C for implementing Fisher's exact test for 2x2 tables (http://fluff.info/blog/arch/00000172.htm), I thought that it would be interesting to implement this particular test in Spad, Boot, Reduce and Common Lisp (see below). Each set of code was required to implement a univariate root finder and the hypergeometric distribution to calculate the p-value under different alternatives, together with the 95% confidence interval and the maximum likelihood estimator for the odds ratio. The reference implementation is R, ... As a caveat: I have little experience with these programs. Any changes or improvements to the programs would be welcomed." Thank you, Mark! I think this is a great contribution. Of course any comparison like is inevitably biased by the previous experience and skill of the programmer. I think Mark has done a pretty good job of the coding but there are some obvious improvements and/or changes in style that could be made. Besides Mark's original goal, I think there are several ways in which a comparison like this might be useful to others, not the least of which is to serve as a way of learning more about the alternative of using of Boot and Lisp in panAxiom. If you have some time available, I hope you will take Mark up on his invitation to suggest changes or improvements to his programs. Regards, Bill Page. |