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I'm a mathematician, yet I'm still part of the do-most-things-in-C camp. I don't think this contradicts your point, though -- I find that C provides a far more well-defined model of computation than scripting languages like perl.

I use C more because I want to know what my code is going to do than because I want to know how it is going to do it.

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As a query, have you looked into lisp at all? I've seen (through HN) examples of stuff like derivatives expressed quite elegantly using Lisp.

Using C for maths programming sounds fun and all, but I'm sure there's got to be a better way of doing things.

I've tried lisp; but for one-time hacks where I'm not aiming for performance or robustness I usually go to the extreme and use Maple.

lisp is also nice for testing arguments, like 0 < a0 < a1 < ... < an < 999, ai ∈ integer

(and (< 0 a0 a1 ... an 999) (apply and (map integer? (list a0 a1 ... an))) (foo bar))

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