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Introduction |
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The Java language is not competitive
for numerical computing. Most numerical development today is done with
Fortran 90, MathWork's MatLab, Visual Numerics' PV-WAVE® and similar
languages. To make Java more competitive with these languages, there are
some proposals made by either academic community, or by software companies. |
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Language
Changes |
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These proposals differ in their targets
and implementations. The first group proposals are made to the Java language
itself. These are only possible to be implemented if they are highly demanded
by Java users and developers, and the developers of the language, i.e.
Sun Microsystems. For example, some features
such as complex numbers, array operators, and array sections (i.e. v[3:9:2]
stands for {v[3], v[5], v[7], v[9]}; the syntax is first:last:increment)
are considered missing for numerical power and competition, and proposed
to the language. |
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Numerical
Libraries |
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The second group proposals are mainly
about constructing numerical libraries. However, these proposals are rather
implementions from their owners. At the moment, many companies and universities
have already developed their own numerical libraries. Meanwhile, these
separate developments of libraries raise some problems in portability,
hence, in excange of the Java source code. The following list has a few
of such libraries:
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Java Front-Ends |
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The third group proposals are about building
highly efficient, inteligent, and yet easy to use front-ends or wrappers
before current high performance computing systems, and opening the power
of these systems to the rest of the world by means of the World Wide Web
and its tools. The current work done so far and some related links are
as follows:
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Java Implementations |
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Finally, there are so many Java implementations
to the common problems of numerical computing, and educational demostrations.
Here are some these sites and indexes to these pages:
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Other References
Java and Numerical Computing References |
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