Schemelab Concept

My PLT Scheme project for this year is to create a Schemelab collection to provide better analysis capabilities in PLT Scheme. It will be something of a mini-Matlab with capabilities similar to what numpy, scipy, and matplotlib provide in Python. I plan on making a new numeric collection to provide homogeneous, n-dimensional arrays (and, as a subset, matrices) as the primary underlying representation. Next, the science collection will be updated to use the new numeric package. Finally, a new plot collection will be developed to provide better visualization functionality. [After these are done I'll also update the simulation and inference collections to use the new Schemelab packages.]

I've already started work on the numeric collection. The basic representational element is a homogeneous, n-dimensional array (ndarray). An ndarray's type and shape are specified when it is created. The type may be any of the element types allowed for SRFI 4 vector types (u8, u16, u32, u64, s8, s16, s32, s64, f32, or f64), a complex type (c64 or c128), or may hold any Scheme object (object). The shape is a list of natural numbers where the length of the shape is the number of dimensions for the ndarray and each element is the cardinality of the corresponding dimension. References to array elements will support array slicing (in any dimension) for both array accessing (array-ref) and mutation (array-set!). Slicing operations create new views of the referenced array as opposed to copying portions of the array. I will start posting entries on different aspects of the numeric collection in the next few days.

The updates to the science collection to support (or to make use of internally) the new numeric collection should be relatively straightforward. The main issue will be to retain compatibility with the existing data types (i.e. vectors). Most of the really numerically complex code (e.g. special functions and random number distributions) will not be affected since they don't generally provide vector or array operations. The main changes will be to the statistics and histogram modules, which will be modified to work with ndarrays as well as vectors. Finally, some of the modules (e.g. histograms and ordinary differential equations) will benefit from being reimplemented using ndarrays internally.

I've also prototyped some code for the new plot package that provides much more functionality than the current PLoT package. The initial capability will be very much patterned after the functionality provided by Matlab (or more precisely, matplotlib for Python, which is also based on Matlab). It provides precise control over the elements of a graph (or multiple subgraphs). It also provides interactive graphics functionality for more dynamic analysis capabilities.

Note that all of these new (or updated) collections require PLT Scheme Version 4 (currently 3.99) and are not compatible with earlier versions. As such, I am not releasing them to PLaneT until either PLT Scheme Version 4 is officially released or there is a separate PLaneT repository for PLT Scheme Version 4 code. I will be putting the code on the Schematics web site at some point.