🚀 go-pugleaf

>>>>> On 17 Aug 90 10:27:00 GMT, cammerdl@camme.UUCP (R. De Langhe CAMME project) said:
R.> On our site, lots of scientists are developping modeling programs to
R.> simulate all kinds of hydrodynamical systems like oil-slick evolution,
R.> wave-height predictions, etc.
R.> Would it not be much more easy and efficient if these scientists could
R.> use an algebra-like programming language, in which they can easily recognize
R.> errors, or proof correctness of an algorithm, etc. and let some kind of a
R.> source-code generator parse their expressions into C (or FORTRAN) ?

This is certainly one of the weakest areas in the field of "scientific
programming".   

I found a very interesting article in the Journal of Computational
Physics in 1966 describing a package written in Algol which wrote 3D
plasma dynamics programs in Algol.  Since this work was done in
1964-1965, it is a bit shocking that in 25 years such techniques have
made such negligible intrusion into the day-to-day activities of
scientific programmers.

One package that I do know of is ELLPACK, a system for generating
FORTRAN programs for solving elliptic partial differential equations.
I believe that Purdue University has the copyright, and that they are
working on an elliptic PDE expert system based on it.

The introduction of higher-level/object-oriented languages will
presumably make the construction of many programs easier, since a
collection of "building blocks" can be constructed to take care of a
lot of the coding detail.   Ken Wilson's group (then) at Cornell was
using C++ for such a project.  I heard that Wilson left Cornell, but I
don't know where he went, or if the "Gibb's Project" followed him.
--
John D. McCalpin			mccalpin@perelandra.cms.udel.edu
Assistant Professor			mccalpin@vax1.udel.edu
College of Marine Studies, U. Del.	J.MCCALPIN/OMNET