NE1 into math software? Look at 'Sage'

Originally posted by adam warlock
I think that for a free matlab replacement http://www.scilab.org/ is the best solution. But I don't really know since I never used matlab nor scilab but remember a teacher of mine praising it.

http://www.neng.usu.edu/cee/faculty/gurro/Scilab.html is supposedly a great help in getting started with scilab.

I think Octave has been progressing FAST and, personally, I think it's already better than Scilab. I have to say I have very little experience with Scilab, though.

I like the fact that with Octave I can use most of my m-files directly (or with very small adjustments). The graphs are still less interactive than Matlab's, but like I said, I don't really use Matlab for pretty graphs.

Originally posted by Palynka
I think Octave has been progressing FAST and, personally, I think it's already better than Scilab. I have to say I have very little experience with Scilab, though.

I like the fact that with Octave I can use most of my m-files directly (or with very small adjustments). The graphs are still less interactive than Matlab's, but like I said, I don't really use Matlab for pretty graphs.

Like I said I don't really know much about scilab, nor matlab. What I used more was Mathematica, but I'm no expert in it.

Originally posted by convect
Does anyone have experience with Python?

I met someone last week who does the same sort of work that I do, much of which is currently in Matlab or FORTRAN, and she had switched from Matlab to Python. She found it superior for what we do, which is data analysis and assimilation (although I mainly just do analysis) of dual Doppler radar data.

I downloaded Python and got the command box up and it seems to work, just did 2+2 and hit enter and it returned 4, of all things🙂
But I tried some of the examples, first one I tried, defining a function, with
>>> def fib(n) which would be the starting line of making a Fibonacci series but I don't know how to go to the second line. I hit enter and all it does is give me a syntax error. I hit the down arrow to no effect. So how do you get to the second line to get on with it?
the rest of the commands are
... a,b=0,1 ... while b RHP won't let me do the rest of the line for some reason. So maybe it is the triple dots that kill things, so imagine triple dots at the beginning of each line:
a,b=0,1
while b print b, a,b=b,a+b then the series comes out, 1,1,2,3,5.
It looks like there is a filter that chops off what looks like attempts to do code here,so I couldn't put the example down right. But anyway, how do you get to the second line in python?