In article <m3ae9ggg00.fsf / qiao.localnet>,
Clemens Hintze  <c.hintze / gmx.net> wrote:
>
>You wrote:
>> Hello,
>
>Hello too, :-)
>
>(...)

Thanks for your long and insightful reply.

>to find some valuable modules, that may help you here for mathematical
>tasks. Some among them:
>
> - NArray
> - BigFloat
> - NumArray
> - Polynomial
>
>(...)

I had a look and did not find the coding globally very consistent or the
mathematics behind always the best. Maybe I can bring my contribution in this
area...

>Erhm ... what? Lack of overloading? Impossible ... ah you mean
>overloading by parameter type, yes? That is indeed not available in
>Ruby (nor in Python or Smalltalk, BTW). The reason is that variables
>are not typed in such languages. Therefore it is difficult (perhaps
>impossible in some cases?) for the compiler to fiddle out on
>compilation time what kind of method to be called later on!

At compilation time, no. But at interpretation time, certainly each object
has a type (class)

>Not totally true! You could alias the old method and create a new one
>with same name like the old one but different behavior! Like that:
>
....

Thank you for the example with 'alias'. Ruby is certainly marvellous in
flexibility: the tools to implement any mechanism are already there!
However, one then has a concern about efficiency. If too much is implemented
in the library the language becomes less efficient. I guess I have to
see in practice how the efficiency works out for a large mathematical
project...

Best regards,
  Jean MICHEL