Ada: interfacing with Matlab

Question

Hi, since Ada doesn't possess any good libraries for scientific computing, I was wondering if anyone has been able to use Matlab mathematical functions such as eig (for calculations of eigenvalues and eigenvectors) within Ada.

I see that some interfaces exist for simulink and Ada. But I'm not a user of Simulink. I would like just to be able to use Matlab mathematical functions through perhaps Ada functions and procedures.

PS: In earlier Ada documents there were lots of talks and promises to create good numerical libraries similar to NAG or NUMAL. I do wonder why this has never been concretized successfully, and any good and robust scientific computing library made available. For sure the Ada language doesn't pale before any other scientific computing language in my opinion.

Thanks a lot...

Answer 1

I can't find anything about it, which is indeed a bit surprising.

If it has a C interface, it is possible to write your own bindings to the routines you need. Just use the interfacing pragmas. The types defined in the package Ada.Interfaces.C would also be of help. Getting things linking and tested on a custom binding can be a wee bit of a challenge though.

Also, it looks like recent versions of Gnat come with a binding generator that can create Ada bindings for you out of C header files. There are six more such tools available here, including one that works on Windows COM DLLs that I've heard good things about.