[erlang-questions] Erlang math libraries

[Jay Anderson]

> This sort of stuff is a fair way off Erlang's beaten path.

That's too bad, many big numerical computations are highly parallelizable which
seems to be the big sell of erlang. Are there reasons these problems are not
solved with erlang? I wrote my own quick and dirty rational module to do what I
need for now.

> A couple of leads which spring to mind are
> 
>   - Wings3d, which you can find on sourceforge, does a fair bit of
>     matrix work in Erlang. It's probably worth looking at the code
>     there (in the e3d directory)
> 

This does indeed have vector and matrix operations, but not for the general
case. (I was pleasantly surprised however by how easy it was to understand their
code. Perhaps that's a tribute to erlang.) I'd want to do much larger matrix
operations. Any thoughts on how to represent a matrix with erlang? (dense or
sparse) Would a list of lists be good enough or would there be a better way?

>   - Tony Rogvall was playing around with various complex/complex 
>     transforms in Erlang a while ago. I don't know if he reads the
>     list, though.
> 
> Classy email address, btw.

Sigh, perhaps it's time for a change. I've had this email for a very long time.
I play the horn. Well, played until I got these blasted braces. They make it
quite a bit more difficult.

-----Jay