(Recovering from a hangover in a hotel room in Colorado... Had this written up a while ago, figure I might as well put it up.)
Try
Octave. Wiki article describing it is
here. You can get get a Windows-compiled version
here.
Basically it's a freely-distributed program that's eerily similar to MATLAB. It's driven off
*.m files and uses much of the same syntax. In fact, I was able to take a MATLAB script I had put together and run it in Octave with the only change being in the
plot command. Does seem to run slower, at least with for-loops... probably on account of MATLAB's just-in-time compiler.
MATLAB is more polished, has a broad range of toolboxes, and is more user-friendly (believe it or not!), but if you need something in a pinch, Octave works well.
Lacking anything particularly cool and racecar-related to show off, I put in a
Lorenz attractor. Fuck it, why not?
2 comments:
I've done all of my tire modelling work with Python and the scientific libraries Numpy and Scipy.
It doesn't take *.m files, but it is open source, and definitely worth a look. Strongly recommended once you attach the libraries to it.
There is a post out there on the internet somewhere called 'Bye Matlab, hello Python, thanks Sage' which goes over a lot of the differences.
Interesting, I did read the post.
I'll admit, despite having used MATLAB extensively at work and at school over the past 3-5 years, my background is not in computer programming at all - so some of the benefits of Python may be lost on me, or at least not immediately obvious. Only did Java briefly in an intro to computing class, then screwed around with Mathematica and MATLAB primarily in college. The god awful Mathcad was in there as well. Never did any C or Fortran, thankfully.
I do agree though, now that I think about it for once, that having outputs suppressed by default (ie without semicolon) makes a lot more sense than verbosely displaying everything! The free part is nice too.
I'll give Python more of a look when I get back to Ohio.
In other news, what all tire modeling work have you done?
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