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The Julia Programming Language

julialang.org

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Re: The Julia Programming Language

#51

Post by ced »

jfager wrote: post #11
coffeeaddicted wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C as desert island programming language but making all indexing 1-based: "the first element of any integer-indexed object is found at index 1, not index 0, and the last element is found at index n rather than n-1, when the string has a length of n." Also begin end blocks - maybe there was a pascal ninja hidden in the syntax committee room?

Matlab, Octave, Mathematica, and other mathematical programming environments use 1-based indexing, it's a well-established norm for the domain.

Does 1-based indexing have any advantage, beyond familiarity to scientists?

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#52

Post by pron »

andrewcooke wrote: post #30

this is surprisingly complete for a relatively new(?) project. one notable restriction is that inheritance is only for interface, not implementation. also, can anyone find a sequence abstraction (like lists)? arrays seem to be fixed size and i don't see anything else apart from coroutines. am i missing something?! [perhaps not, if it's intended for numerical work. on reflection i am moving more and more towards gener…

> one notable restriction is that inheritance is only for interface, not implementation.

Not quite. You do inherit methods defined on abstract types.

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#53

Post by oneofthose »

mjwalshe wrote: post #31
simonw wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty common for new language implementations - Node.js was around for a couple of years before the Windows port was ready. To be honest, if you're targeting early adopters of a programming language Linux and Mac support is probably a lot more important than Windows. Smart Windows users can always run Linux in a VM.

and most users of this sort of languages aren't going to be running it on windows but on Unix systems.

From my experience, a fair amount of scientific computing is done on Windows through Matlab.

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#54

Post by cheald »

wbhart wrote: post #28

Much praise!! These guys have incredibly good taste. Almost every single thing I can think of that I want in a programming language, they have it. All in the one language! The fact that it has parametric types, parametric polymorphism, macros, performance almost as good as C, good C/Fortran interop, 64 bit integers and an interactive REPL all in the one language just blows my mind. I wasn't able to tell if it is poss…

When reading through the manual, I was struck at how similar the language seems to be to Lua, at least superficially.

Lua also has 1-based arrays. Heh.

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#56

Post by ludwigvan »

maximilian wrote: post #44
ludwigvan wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are aiming for smooth transition for MATLAB users. They also have 1-index based arrays as opposed to 0-index .

Fortran is 1-index as well. I think MATLAB gets its notational style from Fortran.

Actually, broadly speaking, I think math (think summation etc.) in general is usually 1-index based while programming is 0-index (due to memory locations so that the array index also points to the first element?).

Also see Dijkstra's take on the matter: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd08xx/EWD831.PDF for

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#57

Post by tomp »

mkl wrote: post #47

The language looks interesting, but I am a bit concerned about the license situation, as in my understanding they have misinterpreted the GPL with regard to shared libraries. Quoting: Various libraries used by the Julia environment include their own licenses such as the GPL, LGPL, and BSD (therefore the environment, which consists of the language, user interfaces, and libraries, is under the GPL). Core functionality…

The FSF interpretation is undermined by the existence of non-GPL Linux programs (that link, call and use data structures from the (GPL-licensed) Linux API).

Re: The Julia Programming Language

#59

Post by tomp »

samth wrote: post #25
almost wrote: post #3

Awesome stuff: http://julialang.org/manual/metaprogramming/

It's great the metaprogramming support seems to be a requirement for new languages these days. Unfortunately, this one combines the inconvenience of Template Haskell (explicit invocation of macros with @) and the bugs of Common Lisp (the section on hygiene says, basically, "we have gensym"). Fortunately, the language is young, and I hope they can improve this story.

What else would you suggest?

I find that the @ syntax is amazing, since the reader (programmer) knows exactly which form is a macro (and can look it up), as opposed to introducing arbitrary, often very confusing syntax.

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