4 replies to this topic

[CodeCat]

What exactly is the difference between these two packages?

I've used Mathematica myself and I liked its ability to solve equations symbolically. I.e. it gives the results as exactly as possible, using mathematical operations if needed, rather than approximating. So if you tell it to solve x^2 = 2 it will give the result as x = sqrt(2) rather than just spitting out 1.4142...

Is MATLAB a good alternative?

[Dauth]

Matlab won't give you the pretty output, but its generally used for higher level programming and vector calculation. Pretty much everything in matlab is treated as a matrix, however that does mean for going through a huge amount of data is very easy.

You can however when working through a problem suppress an output anyway which means you only get out the numbers you want. Matlab can also do a lot of 3d work and even animate a surface wave (in the demos).

There is also the advantage that matlab has been around for ages and everyone has released expansions for it, there are so many new features that you can download its insane. They are all just a plain text file called function.m which you enable in the startup and you're away.

[partyzanpaulzy]

BTW, I think maple is better a bit than matlab (from my beginner experience). But I haven't tried the Mathematica.

Edited by partyzanpaulzy, 27 March 2009 - 22:33.

[Dauth]

With Code's knowledge of C++ he should be more than happy on matlab, though I tend to use a dirty mix of fortran and c, well as long as I don't have to compile it I'll be fine.

[BeefJeRKy]

Maple is very useful for those with little to none experience in programming. As Dauth said though, MATLAB should be more powerful in Code's hands.