Mathematical Programming Languages

Question

Given my previous questions about the the usage of AMPL.

Are there any other programming/scripting languages that are strictly meant for mathmatical processing?

For example: Matlab (it does deviate a bit from a mathematical structure, but its close enough), Mathematica, and AMPL

Answer 1

R / S+ for statistical computing

Other stat languages: SAS, SPSS, STATA, GAUSS, etc.

Octave, an open source clone of Matlab

Fortress, "a language for high-performance computation that provides abstraction and type safety on par with modern programming language principles."

Maple

Maxima

Answer 2

R, Numpy/scipy for Python, Maple, Yacas, even Fortran.

Answer 3

There's always APL, with its builtin matrix operators. Modern APL even supports .NET.

Answer 4

This may be only of historical significance, but Fortan (The IBM Mathematical Formula Translating System) is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing.

Answer 5

Maple for symbolic math (similar to Mathematica).
SAS, SPSS, R for statistics.
The Operation Research / Management Science magazine has a yearly survey of Simulation Software, and while I can't find the link I believe they have one yearly survey on optimization packages, such as AMPL you are quoting.

Answer 6

OPL (Optimization Programming Language) is one of the most comprehensive modelling languages for Mathematical Programming. You can do Linear Programming (LP), Mixed Integer Programming (MIP), Quadratic Programming (QP), Constraint Programming (CP), MIQP, etc.

IBM-ILOG CPLEX Optimization Studio uses this language.

Answer 7

Sage is basically Python with a load of packages and a few language extensions put into a "notebook" interface like that of Mathematica. It has interfaces to all sorts of computer algebra systems. And with Numpy and Scipy (which are included) it's a fine replacement for Matlab. And it's open source and actively developed.

Answer 8

Given your previous question, I assume you are looking for an alternative to commercial mathematics packages. If so, you should try Sage, it is open source and is a unified front end for almost all of the open source mathematics/sci.calc. packages out there (list).

The way it works, is that it uses your web browser as a graphical front end for displaying, editing and evaluating Mathematica style notebooks (it is also possible to just use the command line). All the dirty work, such as selecting the appropriate package for the situation, is done transparently in the background.

Sage uses Python as it's main language / syntax, so it's fairly easy to learn, and if you have old Python scripts, they should work straight out of the box. If I didn't have access to a Mathematica license, I would definitely use this.

Answer 9

Interactive Data Language (IDL) is a proprietary language used in astronomy, medicine and other sciences at least in part because of its built-in array operations and mathematical library.

Answer 10

As this question is still open and well indexed in Google, I would definitively add to the list the Julia language.

Aside the technical aspects that make shine this high level/high performance new language, an important consideration is that the community of developers/users is clearly biased toward mathematicians.