Interfacing PHP with other programs

Anon

Hello

I am trying to develop a web site for electrical engineers and my site relies expensively on math. Of course I can't do this math using PHP but I can do it using C++ or VB. I am really confused about how to go about doing this. Should I do my math using ActiveX.ocx , ActiveX.exe or just any C++.exe program. I know that PHP can connect to ActiveX using the COM functions if the site is hosted in Windows but my site will be hosted on a unix machine. My problem is interfacing with program that I am going to write whether it ActiveX, .exe or anything

Anon

1: never ever write math routines in anything fancy. (let alone V😎
Use C or C++. You don't need all the fancy crapola, just data-in and data-out.

2: write a program that accepts data on the commandline or stdin, and that writes the results to stdout. that way you can receive the output from the program back into PHP using system().
$output=system("math_program -data=1,4,76,8,8,9,5,3,455,4,6");
echo $output;

Anon

Do you mean that PHP can't do the math, or you don't know how to make PHP do it? I'd imagine PHP could likely do the math, but it may not have advanced built in constructs for more advanced things like linear regression or integrals and such.

Anon

Yeah. I mean advanced math like complex algebra (imaginary numbers) etc.

Unfortunately, there is not easy way to do such things and I think there are a lot of libraries that are written in C++ or Visual Basic but they require windows environment.

Anon

Hell, that sounds like a job for an HP calculator! hehe :⁾