| Thank you for your work.
I used PDL early 2000 when working in bioinformatics area. I did not know at the time any of the specialized languages, so intially approaching the project -- I was very concerned on how to deal with matrices, but as I got to understand the PDL better -- i was getting better and better at it. If I may suggest someting (this is based on the old experience though) -- a) some 'built-in' way to seamlessly distribute work across processes and machines. b) some seamless excel and libreoffice calc integration. Meaning that I should be able to 'release' my programs as Excel/Libre Office files. Where I code in PDL but leverage Spreadsheet as a 'UI' + calc runtime. So that when I run my 'make' I get out a Excel/Libre office file that I can version and distribute into user or subsequent compute environments. Where the PDL code is translated into the runtime understood by the spreadsheet engine. I know this is a lot to ask, and may be not in the direction you are going, but wanted to mention still. |
a)
A built-in way would be good. There is some work being explored in using OpenMP with Perl/PDL to get some of that. In the mean time, there is MCE which does distribute across processes and there are examples of using this with PDL <https://github.com/marioroy/mce-cookbook#sharing-perl-data-l...>, but I have not had an opportunity to use it.
b)
Output for a spreadsheet would be difficult if I understand the problem correctly. This would more about creating a mapping of PDL function names to spreadsheet function names --- not all PDL functions exist in spreadsheet languages. It might be possible to embed or do IPC with a Perl interpreter like <https://www.pyxll.com/>, but I don't know about how easy that would be to deploy when distributing to users.
Am I understanding correctly?
Interestingly enough, creating a mapping of PDL functions would be useful for other reasons, so the first part might be possible, but the code might need to be written in a certain way that makes writing the dataflow between cells easier.