I've written software for too many years (punched cards in 1970), so I think I can learn just about any language (eventually, grin). I have a bunch of graphics software that I wrote in a language that appears to be dying (TransEra's HiTech BASIC clone of HP's Rocky Mountain Basic). Over the years, I've gotten pretty fluent in PostScript. I've probably re-written half the graphics commands in HTB as my own subs that actually output PostScript correctly . What I'd like to do is to write a new version of that graphics software. [b]What language/environment would you recommend?[/b]
* I use vector graphics, not bitmap. This is mandatory. If the language has a way to paint vector graphics on the screen, it would make my life much easier. Final output is PostScript (vector), which I distill to PDF.
* I use very large data sets. I'd like to be able to manipulate arrays of floating-point numbers that have more than 32K elements in a dimension. Being able to perform matrix math is a big plus.
* I tend to use a lot of logarithm/exponential functions, so I don't want something that makes that slow or hard to access (can't imagine that would be a problem with a modern language).
* If possible, I'd rather work under Linux than Windows, but that's not a hard requirement. I'm just getting tired of dealing with BSODs, driver conflicts, etc.
* I want to design the charts myself. I've never seen a packaged routine that does the kinds of things that I want to do, and I'm always thinking of new formats, so an off-the-shelf graphics subroutine package is an unlikely option.
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