What is “matrico” and why “The Numerical Schemer”?

This is the development blog accompanying matrico. So, what is matrico? matrico is a CHICKEN Scheme egg providing a flonum matrix module, and hence enabling numerical computation. Let’s analyze the previous statement for proper understanding:

  1. “CHICKEN Scheme” is an R5RS Scheme implementation.
  2. An “egg” is an extension package (format) for CHICKEN Scheme.
  3. “flonum” is Scheme-speak for floating-point number.
  4. A “matrix” is a two-dimensional array.
  5. Numerical computation means calculation with finite-precision numbers, ie flonums.

Finally, floating-point matrix computations are the basis for modern numerical mathematics, and thus Scientific Computing and Computational Science & Engineering.

Now, this blog will explain the technical, programming, algorithmic, numerical, and mathematical details of this module, as well as why Scheme, particularly CHICKEN Scheme, was chosen. Overall, the goal of this blog is to demonstrate numerics in Scheme, to train Numerical Schemers.

Back to matrico: the initial version 0.1 has been released. The repository is located at:

github.com/gramian/matrico

The function reference can be found at:

wiki.call-cc.org/eggref/5/matrico

As matrico is listed in the official CHICKEN Scheme egg repository, it can be installed by:

chicken-install matrico