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MATLAB Can't Manipulate 64-Bit Integers
An anonymous reader writes "MATLAB, an important package of mathematical software heavily used in industry and academia, has had support for 64-bit machines for several years now. However, the MATLAB developers still haven't gotten around to implementing even basic arithmetic operations for 64-bit integers. Attempting to add, divide, subtract, or multiply two 64-bit integers will result in an error message saying that the corresponding method does not exist. As one commentator put it, 'What is the point of having numerical data types that can't be manipulated?'" The post notes that the free MATLAB clone GNU Octave deals with 64-bit integers just fine.
How is this news?
As someone who uses math quite a lot in academia, I can tell you that I've never noticed the missing operators. I just don't use 64-bit integers. The reason *I* upgraded to 64-bit Matlab is because I kept running up against memory constraints. 64-bit Matlab can allocate much larger arrays. I am sure there are places where it would be convenient to use really big integers but I find it hard to believe that this is really a big headache for anyone; the main improvement with the 64-bit version is a much bigger memory space.
If you're a physicist using MATLAB, then you are (a) using floating point arithmetic, not huge integers and (b) more likely to be using Mathematica than MATLAB in the first place. Huge integers are more useful in computer science, doing encryption and data processing and such, than in physical simulations. Says the EE/Physics guy with no background in CS.
Well, having to go dig an additional library to add native types is a bit paradoxal isn't it ? Even more when the software cost a lot of money and is directed at engineers.
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For a program like octave, having no GUI is very forgiveable. There is really no way to work with the system outside of prompt commands. Even Matlab is very prompt based.
What is unforgivable in Octave's case is its graphing capabilities. Octave used Gnuplot for drawing which basically means it is stuck in the 1990s when it comes to making plots. 3D plots are slow, difficult and complicated things to create. Animations are out of the question. 99% of the time, you're better off exporting to png (itself a nighmare), and animating from those. 3D data is all but ungraphable on Linux systems anyway, so I suppose Octave is not alone here.
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Umm, you realize you can do math on greater than 32 bits values in Matlab, just not using the 64-bit platforms's ability to natively handle 64 bit datatypes. After all, I can do make on 64-bit values on an 8-bit micro-controller just fine, it will just take more than a few instructions.
And as stated before, this matters little as it is a performance issue, and matlab still offers the best performance of its class, even vs. those who do have this feature.
using 64-bit integers instead of floats is a common trick in embedded C for control and signal processing on low power processors. I have experience of four different embedded systems used in commercial products from three different companies I've worked with - three of the four used 64-bit integers for roundoff-sensitive calculations.
I was a bit surprised that Matlab can't handle this, but then I've seen the poor quality of the ostensibly production-ready code that comes out of their M2C converter - it was about ten times the code footprint and a fifth the speed of a minimally-optimised C version of the same algorithm.
Honestly, I don't know how anyone can justify paying for this, when R (and even Octave in this instance) is more capable. Where the target platform requires C or asm code, then doing development in Matlab is usually more trouble than it saves. The graphs are prettier, though.