Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

August 22, 2011

Bio-recipes (Bioinformatics recipes) in Darwin

Filed under: Bioinformatics,Biomedical — Patrick Durusau @ 7:43 pm

Bio-recipes (Bioinformatics recipes) in Darwin

If you are working on topic maps and bioinformatics, you are likely to find this a useful resource.

From the webpage:

Bio-recipes are a collection of Darwin example programs. They show how to solve standard problems in Bioinformatics. Each bio-recipe consists of an introduction, explanations, graphs, figures, and most importantly, Darwin commands (the input commands and the output that they produce) that solve the given problem.

Darwin is an interactive language of the same lineage as Maple designed to solve problems in Bioinformatics. It relies on a simple language for the interactive user, plus the infrastructure necessary for writing object oriented libraries, plus very efficient primitive operations. The primitive operations of Darwin are the most common and time consuming operations typical of bioinformatics, including linear algebra operations.

The reasons behind this particular format are the following.

  1. It is much easier to understand an algorithm or a procedure or even a theorem, when it is illustrated with a running example.
  2. The procedures, as written, may be run on different data and hence serve a useful purpose.
  3. It is an order of magnitude easier to modify a correct, existing program, than to write a new one from scratch. This is particularly true for non-computer scientists.
  4. The full examples show some features of the language and of the system that may not known to the casual user of the Darwin, hence they serve a tutorial purpose.

BTW, see also:

DARWIN – A Genetic Algorithm Programming Language

The Darwin Manual

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