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Date: Sun, 18 May 2014 13:33:02 +1000
Subject: Re: Python and Math
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.python:71720

On Sun, May 18, 2014 at 1:13 PM, Bill Cunningham <nospam@nspam.invalid> wrote:
>     Does Python have good mathematical capabilities? I am interested in
> learning a second language for mathematical purposes. I am considering
> looking at python, perl, fortran, Adas out. It looked too complicated to
> learn. Perl looked easy and I haven't really looked into python.

Absolutely it does! In the built-in types, your integer has arbitrary
precision, and there is an arbitrary-precision Decimal type in the
standard library. There is also, naturally, a standard set of trig
functions and so on. With additional libraries, you can get numeric
and scientific functionality (lots of which is written in Fortran, as
I understand it), giving incredibly high performance for a high level
language; look into SciPy and NumPy. Strongly recommend Python for
numeric work.

ChrisA