Re: [tlug] [OT] Japan and 海外 credit cards

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Ai Ling writes:

 > Please excuse what may be a very stupid question, and I'm sure Matlab is a
 > very fine program from my limited experience with it in college (math
 > minor), but... how on earth would one use Matlab in an
 > _accounting/financial_ environment?

VAR, for one.  Whether you parse that as "vector autoregression" (in
English, "we can predict that tomorrow will be basically like today,
only different, in N dimensions") or as "value at risk" (which heavily
uses the other sort of VAR).  However, normally that's only for
prototyping.  Production analytical software is (still) mostly written
in FORTRAN (although frontends and communications software aren't :-).
There was a request for help putting together a conformant FORTRAN 77
environment on the DJGPP list just yesterday (though the poster did
preface it with "for reasons that are obscure and not relevant to the
discussion..." :-).

And believe me, you do not want to fuck with solving Ito integrals in
Excel.  Real quants (aka what my advisor used to "the giant sucking
sound from Wall Street" ... he was not amused at the attrition rate
the better students) use FORTRAN, SAS, S+, and Haskell (heaven help us
all), depending on variables like what they're doing and how close to
realtime the answer needs to be.