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Have they looked at Mathcad?

HarveyHensley
3-Visitor

Have they looked at Mathcad?

I came across an article discussing research in building programming languages to speed up development of simulation programs. Here is the link. And here are some quotes from the article:

"They have created a language similar to the language of mathematics."

"... in the field of programming there is a classic problem linked to selection of the correct units used to describe physical quantities"

"Our new programming language is easy to use, it takes less time to write programmes, and the sources of error have been removed."

Reinventing the wheel comes to my mind.

4 REPLIES 4

Looking at the demos on the developers website its sure interesting but quite different from Mathcad.

But concerning the reinvention of the wheel: When the owner of the only existing wheel begins to damage and destroy it, it may not be the badest idea if someone else builds a second wheel.

I thought that was Maple? At least if I understand the path to Mathcad.

athurin
4-Participant
(To:dschenken)

According to Wikipedia, Maple and Mathcad started only a couple years apart (late 80's), so one could argue that both wheels were developed in parallel. They seemed to have gone in slightly different directions at first, but one made a big step back a few years ago, and the other tries now to increase its market shares by improving its product in the direction of both customer bases' requirements.

For a lot of things, I would agree that this new language is redundant with what Maple and Mathcad have to offer (and even less powerful, as I doubt it does symbolics), but for some very specific applications, it might be actuelly much better.

I do embedded software to control the electronic I design. In my previous company, I designed a simulation package, in C, to simulate both my electronics and the code I would program the microcontrolers with. I don't know if it would be possible to do so in Maple or Mathcad, but I seriously doubt it (and it would probably be a lot more difficult).

Maybe for application mixing software and hardware, having such a programming language can be actually better than regular engineering packages such as Maple and Mathcad...

The new program is concentrating on PDEs, an area which needs a lot of improvement in Mathcad. Thus, it could be a good thing. I just thought it was funny that the statements in the article looked like they could have come out of Mathcad sales literature.

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