Path: csiph.com!eternal-september.org!feeder.eternal-september.org!reader01.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: Ben Bacarisse Newsgroups: comp.programming Subject: Re: are you interested in number theory AND programming Date: Wed, 24 Jun 2020 13:52:51 +0100 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Lines: 48 Message-ID: <877dvwy6ak.fsf@bsb.me.uk> References: <2122d884-f04b-42f8-b95a-a257b61fef86o@googlegroups.com> <3a3b6135-9e6e-42f5-8088-2774a660f504o@googlegroups.com> <87wo4bp8xo.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <87k10boswq.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <61c49983-9b6b-4f91-adf8-86aa33ada235o@googlegroups.com> <8b0924a3-e189-400c-825b-407a711f9947o@googlegroups.com> <11604552-75ea-4a4b-86d2-e5747a9c6a0fo@googlegroups.com> <6d19d218-3a96-40da-aaf9-155882ed09b5o@googlegroups.com> <7d267127-1d8e-487f-a26f-7e21a6e2e6a4o@googlegroups.com> <599aa968-958c-4f03-868a-9ffd066aba4co@googlegroups.com> <5480a2e3-4494-402c-95ff-38ae6239cadfo@googlegroups.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain Injection-Info: reader02.eternal-september.org; posting-host="c47f07ad573d4045e86d5932ec683a24"; logging-data="18619"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX18wMCjBfBdQzbpml2wSFiUGY72jpEsKKMs=" Cancel-Lock: sha1:QhzoIiXuM3qwEVDKsXweyN+fdQU= sha1:nGe3QzqKNWqkqs/OI72AUYWXapc= X-BSB-Auth: 1.c3449232972973b03f94.20200624135251BST.877dvwy6ak.fsf@bsb.me.uk Xref: csiph.com comp.programming:10982 David Brown writes: > On 23/06/2020 13:50, syed owais wrote: >> well, I am learning fortran,which I believe is suitable for engineers >> and scientists. > > Fortran would be a good choice here - if it were still 1970. Fortran was a good choice when you wanted to leverage the vast (and expensive) libraries that were once Fortran-only. It's still a reasonable choice is you want to do fancy things with arrays because it fairly sophisticated array handling, but I would not choose it for number theory work then or now. >> I will work in mathematica software once I develop some proficiency >> with fortran. This is how I have planned it. I would want to avoid an expensive, proprietary language but you (the OP) may have reasons not to worry about that, or maybe the symbolic processing it offers make it a big win for you in other ways. > There is lots of mathematical software available. Some make it easy to > write code, others do not. Some is geared towards numerical > calculations (handling big matrices, efficient floating point > calculations, etc.), some for symbolic work, some for number theory, and > so on. Some is expensive, some is open source. > > > > There are only two languages I would recommend for starting programming > with a view to doing mathematics (other than those built into > specialised mathematical software). One is Haskell, the language Ben > used. It is a functional programming language - a kind of programming > that has a very mathematical style to it. The other is Python, which is > a high-level general purpose programming language. That's the language > I used in an early response to your post. That is the language that > will get you results fastest. Both have built-in "big num" support, and both have built-in rationals (well, I know Haskell does and I think Python does too) which are things I'd want to have for number theory. Prolog comes with big numbers and some sophisticated mechanisms for satisfying constraints, but it seems to be odd enough that many people find it hard to learn. -- Ben.