On the QRP-L mailing list, there has been a lot of discussion about how to do technical calculations. Much of the discussion focused on PC solutions, but there were a couple that could also be implemented on a Mac:
- Spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are becoming very popular for performing engineering calculations and analyzing data. There’s even a book out on the topic: Excel Scientific and Engineering Cookbook. For some operations, the book describes functions implemented in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), but I just paid a quick visit to the NeoOffice website, and it notes that NeoOffice will soon be supporting VBA macros.
- Octave. According to the Octabe website, GNU Octave is a high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations. It provides a convenient command line interface for solving linear and nonlinear problems numerically, and for performing other numerical experiments using a language that is mostly compatible with Matlab. It may also be used as a batch-oriented language. There are versions of Octave that will run under Mac OSX, Linux, and even Windows.
- MacPython. MacPython is the Mac version of the Python programming language. It’s more of a general-purpose programming language, but I’ve been interested in learning it for a while now. Many web applications are done in Python.
All of these solutions are also available for the PC.
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