I know both of them can be programmed. Are they programming languages strictly speaking and turing-complete?
Yes.
If you don't like this answer provide accurate and precise definition of programming language. Turing complete I'm OK with.
MATLAB and Mathematica are fourth-generation programming languages.
You might be interested in seeing these answers to a similar question about Matlab and also this explanation by Wolfram about the ways in which Mathematica is a programming language.
It is Wolfram language from now on, not Mathematica language. References here and here and here
So, yes, the Wolfram language is a computer language.
Related
Is there any Octave's alternative to Matlab's pointCloud()?
I believe the short answer is No. Octave has only recently implemented a fairly robust equivalent of classdef, so many of the Matlab classes, that have been introduced in the past few years, including PointCloud, have not yet been implemented.
Is it possible to use a MATLAB code on Scilab? Is that what is meant when saying that Scilab is a "clone" from MATLAB?
There is a tool to automatically convert Matlab source to Scilab source, it's called M2SCI. A script parses the Matlab source code and replaces Matlab-specific functions by Scilab ones. See the documentation of the mfile2sci function.
Yes you can use MATLAB code on scilab. See these links for more information:
http://help.scilab.org/docs/5.4.0/fr_FR/section_36184e52ee88ad558380be4e92d3de21.html
http://help.scilab.org/docs/5.4.0/en_US/index.html
I would not bet on it. But if your code is simple enough chances are good.
Problems are:
There is encrypted p-code in Matlab that Scilab will not be able to open.
Matlab usually comes with a number of toolboxes that might not be available to you (i think especially Simulink)
last but not least (i don't know about scilab) there usually are minute differences in how functions are implemented.
There are a number of projects out there trying to replicate/replace MATLAB:
Julia language: which has a relatively similar syntax to MATLAB and offers great performance, but still lacks a lot of toolboxes/libraries, as well as not having a GUI like MATLAB. I think this has the brightest future among all MATLAB alternatives.
Python language and its libraries NumPy and matplotlib: which is the most used alternative. I think at this moment the community is a couple of orders of magnitude even bigger than MATLAB. Python is the de facto standard in machine learning and data science at the moment. But still, the syntax and memory concept is a bit far from what people are used to in the MATLAB ecosystem. There are also no equivalent to SIMULINK, although Spyder and Jupyter projects have come a long way in terms of the development environment.
Octave: is basically a clone of MATLAB to a point they consider any incompatibility as a bug. If you have a long MATLAB code that you don't want to touch, this is the safest bet. But again no alternative for SIMULINK.
SciLab and it's fork ScicoLab are the best alternatives in terms of GUI, having a SIMULINK replica xcos / scicos and a graphical user interface development features. However the community is not as big as Octave and the syntax is not completely compatible. Sadly the Scilab development team has gone through a devastating family crisis leading to the software falling behind.
Honorary mention of Modelica language implementations OpenModelica and jModelica for being a superior alternative to SIMULINK-SimScape. You should know that you can load Modelica scrips also in xcos and scicos. If you want to kno wmore about JModelica you may see this post.
you may check the MATLAB's Alternativeto page to see more Free and Open source alternatives.
I have a rather complicated optimisation problem I want to solve in matlab, I posted it on math.stackexchange.com since it supports LaTeX maths display,
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/210166/some-type-of-mixed-integer-nonlinear-programming-problem
I would really appreciate it if anyone can give me some suggestions on that.
I didn't go into much details of the minimization problem you described, but it made me think of http://www2.maths.ox.ac.uk/chebfun. It is an open source numeric computing toolbox that at least superficially seems interesting. Maybe you can use it to solve your problem.
I have been using cvx for doing some experiments with my SDPs. Although it is very easy to use, it is quite slow. I cannot run reasonably large instances in reasonable time. Hence would like someone to point to some faster software.
You can find a list of Semidefinite Programming codes on Hans Mittelmann's Decision Tree for Optimization Software. At least some of the codes are implemented in Matlab (like cvx, right?) or have a Matlab interface.
I’m looking for a good numerical computing library for C programming language.
Similar to LAPACK with good documentation would be very helpful.
Thanks & Regards,
Upul
It's ugly C (machine translation from Fortran), but you might find clapack useful. You might also want to take a look at ATLAS. There are also quite a few implementations of BLAS in C -- enough that I'd have difficulty picking one to recommend.
Check out the GNU scientific library
http://www.gnu.org/s/gsl/