Jump to content

Yorick (programming language)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Guy Harris (talk | contribs) at 00:28, 28 September 2016 (The "Mac" version is command-line and built with "make" and "make install", so it's a Unix version, hence it runs on macOS. If there was ever a version for the classic Mac OS, update as appropriate. Update links for Yorick's new home.). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
Yorick
Designed byDavid H. Munro
First appeared1996; 29 years ago (1996)
Stable release
2.2.04 / May 2015; 10 years ago (2015-05)
OSUnix-like systems including macOS, Microsoft Windows
LicenseBSD
Filename extensions.i
Websiteyorick.github.com

Yorick is an interpreted programming language designed for numerics, graph plotting, and steering large scientific simulation codes. It is quite fast due to array syntax, and extensible via C or Fortran routines. It was created in 1996 by David H. Munro of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Features

Indexing

Yorick is good at manipulating elements in N-dimensional arrays conveniently with its powerful syntax.

Several elements can be accessed all at once:

> x=[1,2,3,4,5,6];
> x
[1,2,3,4,5,6]
> x(3:6)
[3,4,5,6]
> x(3:6:2)
[3,5]
> x(6:3:-2)
[6,4]
Arbitrary elements
> x=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]
> x
[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]
> x([2,1],[1,2])
[[2,1],[5,4]]
> list=where(1<x)
> list
[2,3,4,5,6]
> y=x(list)
> y
[2,3,4,5,6]
Pseudo-index

Like "theading" in PDL (Perl Data Language) and "broadcasting" in Numpy (Numeric extension for Python), Yorick has a mechanism to do this:

> x=[1,2,3]
> x
[1,2,3]
> y=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]
> y
[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]
> y(-,)
[[[1],[2],[3]],[[4],[5],[6]]]
> x(-,)
[[1],[2],[3]]
> x(,-)
[[1,2,3]]
> x(,-)/y
[[1,1,1],[0,0,0]]
> y=[[1.,2,3],[4,5,6]]
> x(,-)/y
[[1,1,1],[0.25,0.4,0.5]]
Rubber index

".." is a rubber-index to represent zero or more dimensions of the array.

> x=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]
> x
[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]
> x(..,1)
[1,2,3]
> x(1,..)
[1,4]
> x(2,..,2)
5

"*" is a kind of rubber-index to reshape a slice(sub-array) of array to a vector.

> x(*)
[1,2,3,4,5,6]
Tensor multiplication

Tensor multiplication is done as follows in Yorick:

P(,+,,)*Q(,,+)

means

> x=[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]
> x
[[1,2,3],[4,5,6]]
> y=[[7,8],[9,10],[11,12]]
> x(,+)*y(+,)
[[39,54,69],[49,68,87],[59,82,105]]
> x(+,)*y(,+)
[[58,139],[64,154]]