speed comparison of IDL, numPy, Matlab

[David Lees]

Paul,

Thanks for the URL to pydl.  It looks quite interesting.

I am a Python newbie, but your comments Python syntax and being "wordy"
seem a bit misplaced.  The 'for' statement could have been written with
a 'range' so that it looks similar to the IDL for statement.  The
wordiness of Python relative to IDL or Matlab is just due to the built
in functions used, not something inherent in Python.  A function could
easily be defined for generating the uniform square matrices used in the
benchmark.  I really like the balance that Python achieves between
clarity and program length.  Certainly there have been languages like
APL that were far more compact than IDL or Matlab, but they were a bit
cryptic for my taste.

david lees


Paul van Delst wrote:
> 
> Benyang Tang wrote:
> >
> > Out of curiosity, I did a quick benchmark test of IDL, NumPy and Matlab on my
> > desktop machine. I know benchmarking is a complicated issue; don't take my
> > naive test too serious.
> 
> O.k.  :o)
> 
> I've never used Python, and Matlab only once or twice, but what's with the Python syntax?
> Seems a tad wordy. Looks like Nick Bower's IDL-like package in Python
> (http://nickbower.com/computer/pydl) is worth another look though......
> 
> paulv
> 
<snip>