Houston, Texas-based Visual Numerics Inc, the company formed by the merger of Precision Visuals Inc with IMSL Inc, has introduced PV-Wave Advantage 4.2, an enhanced version of its graphics visual data analysis software, which includes a set of C and Fortran programming libraries, for Microsoft Corp’s Windows NT and Unix. The company also announced support for third party graphics software and relational databases. The existing version PV-Wave is designed to display visually statistical and complex data via multi-dimensional graphics and tables. The new libraries will enable programmers to write ready-made sub-routines into PV-Wave-based applications without the need to re-code the whole thing. The C libraries, which are called C/Math/Library andC/Stat/Library, are designed for Unix and NT users. C/Math includes more than 150 callable maths functions such as transforms, equations, optimisation, interpolation, Eigensystem analysis and Quadrature, the company claims. The C/Stat/Library has over 70 callable routines including analysis of variance, correlation, registration and time series and forecasting. The Fortran libraries are configured to run on minsupercomputers, and they are claimed to provide programmers with more than 900 mathematical and statistical sub-routines. Visual Numerics has also added support for Maple Software Inc’s Maple 2.0, a graphical mathematical package that is designed to solve equations visually. Support for other third party products will follow later this year, the company says. Gateways to Oracle Corp and Sybase Inc’s eponymous relational database management systems will be supported via Microsoft Corp’s Open Data Base Connectivity specification. PV-Wave Advantage 4.2 is available from June 30 on Hewlett-Packard Co, Sun Microsystems Inc, Digital Equipment Corp Alpha and IBM Corp Unix systems. A Windows NT version will ship in August. Prices start at from UKP5,000 depending upon system. Both libraries can be purchased as separate modules for UKP2,500.
