Re: DHARMI project

[Miroslav Silovic <silovic@zesoi.fer.hr>]

Eric Wolf <panda@erols.com> writes:

> Hi folks,
>    I hope this is the correct place to put this.  I have a weird project
> that  bends the meaning of a language. Some friends took a look and
> suggested I switch from java to Scheme,  and I got a further
> recommendation to switch to Guile.
> 
>   This project grew out of frustration with Visual Basic,  in the bad
> old days before I knew about Linux.  It started as a java toolkit for
> hooking up GUIs to data modelling programs,  but grew into something
> beyond.  It became a way for the user to modify the structure and
> behavior of running programs.
> 
>   The aim of this project is to create a language that is well suited to
> writing scientific models,  and hooking them up like tinker-toys.  The
> hooking up can done via command line (included in every programs'
> interface) or  visually via drag and drop.  I do not intend for this
> project to rely on the GUI,  but  I still want it to have a rather nifty
> one.
> 
> It is called DHARMI (Data Habitat And Rapid Modelling Infrastructure)
> and can be found at http://www.erols.com/panda/
> 
> I want your advice on whether or not this can be a viable and
> worth-while project.

This sounds like a GREAT idea. IMHO, Guile is very suited to the task,
for the following reason:

	1 - most scientifically relevant datatypes are already in place
	    (including arrays of arbitrary dimension, with real or
	     complex elements)

	2 - if you look around a bit, you're very likely to find major
	    parts of your project already done or in a fairly advanced
	    state of development by other groups

	3 - Guile treats its data as 'chunks' - no fuss about
	    type mismatches, but everything checks the input types
	    where it's supposed to be checked.

Finally, I /think/ I read about somebody porting SciLab to Guile.
SciLab or Octave, if ported on top of Guile, would give you a major
part of the functionality needed for scientific modelling (and it
shouldn't be too hard for you to do yourself).

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