Calculize: A Mathematical Scripting Language

Re:Calculize: A Mathematical Scripting Language by j4mie on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @11:47AM (#2864428)

Impressive. They seem to have added operator overloading to CoffeeScript, among other things:

    # 1. Matrix multiplication

    m1 = matrix([1,  2,  5],
                [2, -1,  6],
                [5, 10, -1])

    m2 = matrix([2,   3,  1],
                [-3, -1, -3],
                [4,   9, -2])

    show m1 * m2

Not sure how this could be used for "serious" number crunching (as it runs in-browser) but I imagine it would be a fantastic teaching tool.

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Re:Calculize: A Mathematical Scripting Language by jashkenas on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @11:53AM (#2864459)

One major problem with any JS-based language for number crunching is JS' lack of any numeric types other than a double.

I don't know how well the string-based workarounds really work, for arbitrary precision math ... but I'd imagine that they wouldn't be terribly fast or convenient. It's a real shame.

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Re:Calculize: A Mathematical Scripting Language by mbrubeck on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @12:54PM (#2864715)

Current versions of Firefox and Chrome have typed arrays, which add more numeric types for performance optimization. Hopefully we will see them in other browsers soon: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/javascript_typed_arrays

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Re:Calculize: A Mathematical Scripting Language by Someone on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @06:48PM (#2865848)

It would need lots and lots and lots of work before I would call it a fantastic teaching tool. For example, it is spectacularly naive at plotting functions. Even a relatively simple function such as 1/sin(x) already brings it to its knees.

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Re:Calculize: A Mathematical Scripting Language by Vivtek on Tuesday August 09, 2011 @11:52AM (#2864456)

You could use it as a prototyping tool, then run JS on a server for "serious" crunching, maybe.

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