A very cool package to download for physics and/or programmi

[XMEN Ashaman DTM]

it's called ROOT.

It's from the folks at CERN. Yes, the particle collider folks. They have some very cool analysis and physics tools in there (some nice tools for analyzing HUGE data sets too... could be useful to look at stock market data). And there's also a neat tool called cling.

Cling is a neat programming tool, especially for me coming from an engineering background, because it allows you to write c or c++ code into an interpreter. Yes, you can write code at the command line, that then gets interpreted, without having to go through and compile and run the code on your own. I used a tool we had in school that did something similar. And I'll tell you what, if you are learning/remembering/relearning c or c++, it is an awesome tool. It doesn't do everything that the c++ standard calls for, but it comes close.

I'm building it now on my linux box, and have had some difficulty building it on my windows box.

FYI, the compiler used to do the interpreting of the c/c++ code is called Clang. I've used it and it makes some very easy to read and understand abstract syntax trees, and you can easily make callgraphs and see how your code changes state and runs based on the data that clang provides. The clang tool is a sort of chain of tools that each do a specific task, and a lot of information is carried forwards as your code is compiled and linked so that the tools can each do their job better.

root.cern.ch is the site to get the code or look up the root tools. pretty cool stuff.

[XMEN Gambit]

IIRC, there's a group trying to get Clang to replace gcc. Seems pretty capable but there's a difference of vision (multiplatform, etc) that Clang can't quite overcome yet.

[XMEN Ashaman DTM]

True.

I think the best thing clang has going for it is the amount of "meta-data" associated with the steps in the compilation process.