Subject: Re: CCL:langage

From: Konrad Hinsen <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 1997 17:34:14 +0100

> In this context of fairly long-term projects with high turnover and poor
> communication between succesive programmers, pieces of code written by
> some people must be used easily by others, hence codes must be at least
> modular. Experience with Fortran has shown us that training students,
> because of the limited time allocated, are in a hurry to implement as
> much as possible, and resulting code is not well structured. On the
> other hand, since they are mostly students in physics or chemistry, most
> of them do not master C or C++ , although all of them have some
> programming experience, for instance with Pascal or Basic.
> 
> According to me, none of those free langages, C, C++ and Fortran, is a
> good choice and I am looking for a SIMPLE langage supporting REUSABILITY
> and QUICK DEVELOPMENT. 

You don't list all of your requirements, and their relative importance,
so it is difficult to make precise suggestions. If simplicity and
rapid development of reusable code is your top priority, you should be
looking at object-oriented high-level (generally interpreted) languages.
You do pay in execution speed, however, although the penalty factor
depends very much on your problem (and it can in practice even be
to your advantage in some cases).

In this language category, my recommendation for scientific use is
Python. It is an exceptionally clear language (no weird symbols with
special meanings), and there is already a useful collection of modules
for scientific use. Moreover, Python allows integration of C code in
an almost trivial way, so you can always write the time-critical parts
of your code in C.

More information on Python is at http://www.python.org, and on scientific
applications in Python at http://starship.skyport.net/crew/hinsen/.
-- 
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Konrad Hinsen                          | E-Mail: [email-masked]
Laboratoire de Dynamique Moleculaire   | Tel.: +33-4.76.88.99.28
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