Design Issues in a Matlab-Based Environment for Numerical Program Development

We describe some design considerations related to the development of environments to support scientific computing. The context is FALCON, an environment based on MATLAB and supporting an algebraic language combined with a compiler and transformation system to provide the developer the freedom of algorithm representation and reduced development time. The system includes both traditional compiler techniques and other transformations that utilize algebraic information about the operations performed and target libraries in which they are implemented.