Algae

Algae is a numerical analysis programming language that was developed to provide a fast, versatile tool capable of handling large systems. Its key features include speed, ability to handle sparse arrays, array labels, vectors, and statistical profiling. Algae has been applied successfully to interesting problems in aerospace and related fields for more than a decade.

One of the most notable advantages of Algae is its speed. Compared to other popular programming languages like Octave, RLaB, and Scilab, Algae is generally faster in processing. Although it used to be dramatically faster than MATLAB, its performance issues have largely been resolved.

Algae's ability to handle sparse arrays is another useful feature, allowing for practical analysis in many fields. This is particularly relevant in structural dynamics where large matrices with 200,000 rows and columns are a norm.

In Algae, users can label every vector and matrix, and these labels persist consistently across operations, ensuring easy access to each specific element. This is a significant improvement over MATLAB, where expressions like states[127] are often used, making it harder to track the size and order of the equations.

Algae recognizes scalars, vectors, and matrices as distinct data types, which is considered an advantage over MATLAB's ambiguous approach with two valid yet incompatible vector types (row and column).

Algae's statistical profiling capability is a powerful tool for performance improvement, allowing users to see where their code spends its time, by file and by line number.

In the latest release, version 4.3.2, a label handling bug in "set" has been fixed, and label handling in "complement", "intersection", and "union" has been cleaned up and documented. This demonstrates the development team's commitment to continually improving the software.