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Re: Speeding up Mathematica

  • To: uiucuxc!yoda.ncsa.uiuc.edu!mathgroup
  • Subject: Re: Speeding up Mathematica
  • From: uiucuxc!yoda.ncsa.uiuc.edu!paul%wri (Paul Abbott)
  • Date: Wed, 14 Mar 90 10:21:49 CST

Stephen Wolfram has done quite a bit of work on a function compiler for
Mathematica which he hopes to make available for the next release.

Also, you remark that you find Mathematica slow compared to Fortran
and C.  This remark has to be taken into context because the algebraic
and diverse programming styles available in Mathematica mean that there
are several ways of attacking a problem and these may be comparable or
in many cases even faster than straight procedural programming.

Paul Abbott 
Wolfram Research

[I can fully support Paul's comments here.  I tried for several
years to write some pattern matchers in C to do some of my
quantum field theory calculations.  I was able to do the
same work in Mathematica in a few weeks and with more power.
True, the compiled C code ran a bit faster at first, but considering
development time, Mathematica won easily.  I have also found
it to be a lot of fun to find tricky ways to optimize Mathematica
code using lower level Mathematica functions.  Conversations with
Paul and others at WRI convince me that there are lots of nice
techniques one can try. - SMC]



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