Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Paul Rubin Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Astronomy and programming languages Date: Sat, 03 Jun 2017 10:27:04 -0700 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 18 Message-ID: <87inkdnfrr.fsf@nightsong.com> References: <2017Jun3.110911@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: mx02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="ed6073a7d19c1a44f30930d9ac4c0f27"; logging-data="7834"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1/rlJCbTVHOmRNAtAsSCsHn" User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Cancel-Lock: sha1:eNURr9+PLep8bdMePZ50jW/hSas= sha1:3dN5e40oX9+6+cZWWaxaxaoUdUo= Xref: csiph.com comp.lang.forth:60242 anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) writes: > The interesting thing for Forthers context is that Forth used to be > very strong in astronomy. AAUI Forth was strong at spacecraft and telescope control, i.e. low level hardware control tasks for which Forth is still strong today. The Python program mentioned was being used for data analysis which I don't think was ever a Forth strong spot. > * [Python] works nicely with other languages such as C and Fortran, > rather than doing everything yourself because you can do it better. The CPython C API is actually rather a pain, though you can use it if you have to. Libraries like numpy/scipy do that (a lot of work goes into them) but if I want to mix C and Python, I usually do it as separate programs, i.e. a Python script as a control wrapper, that launches C programs as it goes along.