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Hello Lawrence,
how nice for me to be able to almost agree with you. I never thought I would
see the day. :-) No, just kidding. I like your posts, except when it comes
to Java!
As far as Mathematica is concerned (I don't know about Maple), the language
actually has *arbitrary* floating point precision built-in, enabling you to
specify the desired internal accuracy of a calculation. This is important
because of the issue of floating-point error propagation. As you know this
problem can lead to totally meaningless results which may be wrong in all
places of the mantissa, and sometimes can even be several orders of
magnitude away from reality.
It always surprises me when I see people use Metastock or Tradestation for
calculation-intensive number crunching while being entirely at the mercy of
the built-in accuracy, or lack of it, of these packages.
We had such a case some time ago on the Metastock list where one poster got
into big arguments with Metastock support because the software would give
him signals different from those he was getting with Excel. The reason
turned out to be some decimal in a calculation which finally lead to a
different result, caused by different floating-point implementations. And
these calculations were just simple Moving Averages, not Fourier analysis or
the inverting of Hilbert matrices!
So this issue of accuracy is not to be taken lightly, IMHO.
Best wishes,
Michael Suesserott
-----Ursprungliche Nachricht-----
Von: Lawrence Chan [mailto:stnahc@xxxxxxxx]
Gesendet: Thursday, April 12, 2001 15:51
An: MikeSuesserott; John Nelson; Bilo Selhi
Cc: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
Betreff: Re: AW: PORTING TRADESTATION TO MATLAB
Just a geenral comment on Mathematica,
1. both Mathematica and Maple have "huge" number
core engine that can preserve precision of calculation
to 10 times the precision of using simple double
precision routines like SPSS, S, etc. That's the
reason
why Mathematica can produce the correct results while
the other ones cannot :)
2. both Mathematica and Maple have their own language
that are very steep in learning curve and to most
people who is not used to express their concepts in
mathematica formulas such languages are "too hard" to
use.
3. have both mathematica and maple and definitely
find their financial add-on packages sort of useless
as they are designed mainly for school teaching
usage ...
4. in my opinion both packages are great for
research but forget about using them in real time.
-Lawrence
--- MikeSuesserott <MikeSuesserott@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> You're right, John. Unless one devotes some time
> (weeks, rather than hours)
> to really learning the language, Mathematica will
> appear difficult to use.
> Once you have mastered the essentials, you can do
> unbelievable things with
> Mathematica. Plus there are packages running the
> gamut from astrophysics to
> option evaluation.
>
> In a recent comparison of popular math/statistics
> packages using a series of
> standardized reference problems (designed to test
> the accuracy of results)
> provided by the National Institute for Standards and
> Testing (NIST),
> Mathematica was the only package that got every
> single result accurate to
> the full number of digits provided by NIST as the
> certified correct result.
> For the mortification of the competition, here is
> the table of results from
> the NIST testing, (using the best solutions
> available from each package).
> Out of a total of 58 reference problems:
>
> Package Able to Solve at All Accurate Solutions
> Excel 41 1
> SAS 6.12 47 1
> SPSS 7.5 48 3
> S-Plus 4.0 57 1
> Stata 6.0 50 5
> Mathematica 4.0 58 58
>
> Mind you, this test was in the field of statistics,
> where Mathematica has no
> specialization such as these other packages have
> (except Excel).
>
> Have a nice evening!
>
> Michael Suesserott
>
>
> -----Urspr|ngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: John Nelson [mailto:trader@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Gesendet: Thursday, April 12, 2001 01:31
> An: MikeSuesserott; Bilo Selhi
> Cc: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
> Betreff: RE: PORTING TRADESTATION TO MATLAB
>
>
>
> I started out with symbolic math using Mathematica
> on
> NeXTStep hardware and found myself becoming more of
> a
> Mathematica "programmer" than a Mathematica "user".
>
> Powerful, but demanding of my time and I couldn't
> afford
> the commitment.
>
> I suspect that current versions of Mathematica are
> also
> much more expensive than the alternatives.
>
> -- John
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: MikeSuesserott
> [mailto:MikeSuesserott@xxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2001 11:36 AM
> To: Bilo Selhi
> Cc: omega-list@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: PORTING TRADESTATION TO MATLAB
>
>
> Hi Bilo,
>
> you wrote:
>
> >>"i reiterate that matlab or mathcad (s-plus )
> >>are the best math/engineering
> >>platforms available. nothing can
> >>beat those now just as nothing can beat TS
> >>as far as system development."
>
> Not to start any war, but that sweeping statement is
> perhaps a bit
> overenthusiastic. Don't forget Mathematica which is
> much more powerful than
> either of these two packages. You can find a brief
> comparison at these
> University of Colorado websites:
>
> http://amath.colorado.edu/computing/mmm/brief.html
> http://amath.colorado.edu/computing/mmm/index.html
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Michael Suesserott
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