Konrad Hinsen <konrad.hinsen@fastmail.net> wrote:
Scientific communication depends more and more on scripts as the only precise documentation of a computational method. Our programming languages are becoming a major form of scientific notation, alongside traditional mathematics.
To me it seems that algorithms in scientific papers and books are described in various forms of pseudo-code. Perhaps we need a notation which is universal and ethernal like the language mathematics. But I am not sure Python could or should try to be that "scripting" language. I also think it is reasonable to ask if journals should require code as algorithmic documentation to be written in some ISO standard language like C or Fortran 90. The behavior of Python and NumPy are not dictated by standards, and as such is not better than pseudo-code. Sturla