[R] Suitability of R for Algorithm simulations

[François Pinard]

Hi, people.

A correspondent puts me in front of a reply I sent to r-help, a few 
weeks ago, and quoted below.  I should have been tired when I sent it.
Please replace "Eiffel" by "Erlang" all over.  Sorry for this error.

  Date: 2006-10-05 00:43:36
  Message-ID: 20061005004336.GA24159 at alcyon.progiciels-bpi.ca

  [Ethan B. Fini]

  > I would like to be able to instantiate an object for each node in my
  > simulated  (stand alone, one computer) "distributed" environment and
  > then proceed by (a)  adding message exchange functionality and (b)
  > algorithm  behavior to each node.

  Not so long ago, I quickly glanced at Eiffel after an enthusiastic
  friend told me about it, and while I do not think I will soon use it for
  myself, Eiffel might be the right choice for you, being strong on
  light-weight processes and message passing, from what I've read...

  If I had a simulation problem to tackle nowadays, I'd likely consider
  Python supplemented with greelets from the pylib library, mainly because
  I'm fond on Python legibility, and have a reasonably good confidence in
  people having implemented greenlets.

  > The simulation results are represented on a GUI [...]

  The GUI aspects of Eiffel are unknown to me, I did not dive deep enough
  to touch them.  For Python, I'd use pygtk, but there are many toolkits
  to choose from.

  > Is R suitable for what I am trying to do? I looked around but have not
  > been able to determine if R is the appropriate platform.

  R libraries are especially good at statistics and graphics.  The
  language in itself is much oriented towards vectorisation, among other
  things, and this might be convenient for a speedy implementation of some
  simulation problems.  If vectorisation could not be turned into an
  advantage for you with R, it is likely that R might be slow for such
  problems, and also not so well adapted to quasi-parallelism between
  interacting processes having each their own behaviour.

  Of course, seasoned R users might have much more sound opinions than
  mine on this topic! :-)

--
François Pinard   http://pinard.progiciels-bpi.ca