On Fri, 26 Mar 2010, Robert Nesius wrote: > As mentioned, heavy math and statistics points in another direction, > such as R, matlab, or specialized libraries in other languages. Nice comments (deleted here for space). I would add to the line above that GNU Octave (octave.org) is very nice free software system that attempts to clone MATLAB functionality so that it can run MATLAB code unchanged. It also has very nice features that MATLAB does not have, and a ton of readily available functions and packages written by others. For me, in my work, with the people I know, I'm pushing R over Octave, but if I were in engineering, especially signal processing, I think Octave would probably be the better choice. Also, for people who know MATLAB, Octave will be very easy to learn, to say the least. Mike