Enjoying a Free Lunch: Computational Economics with Linux

Dirk Eddelbittel

Linux is a Unix operating system which has been written entirely from scratch over the last five years by Linus Torvalds and others. It contains no proprietary code, and is, inclusive of all source code, distributed freely under the terms of the GNU General Public License. Linux implements the POSIX operating system standard, along with extensions from the System V and BSD variants of Unix. It has all of the features one would expect in a modern Unix system, including multitasking, virtual memory, shared libraries, demand loading, efficient memory management and complete TCP/IP networking. Further, Linux runs on a variety of hardware platforms: IBM PC compatibles with a 386/486/586/686 CPUs, workstations with SUN Sparcs and Digital Alpha CPUs as well as on some Amiga and Ataris with the Motorola 68k. Support for PowerPC and MIPS processors is currently under development. In this paper, we review the applicability of Linux for computational economics and finance.

Linux by itself is a very powerful (and extremely reliable) operating system that can be employed for almost any computational purpose. As a Unix system, Linux provides excellent multitasking and multiuser support. Moreover, the availability of the X11 windowing system, (La)TeX and all the very networking standards and protocols around which the Internet is build make Linux both an excellent network server and a client machine.

Concerning standard packages, economists will appreciate the availability of many commonly used commercial programs such as Gauss, Limdep, Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, Rats, Shazam, Stata and TSP. Furthermore, excellent free programs are available for mathematical applications as for example Octave, Ox, Pari and SciLab. More general commercial applications such as spreadsheets, word processors (including WordPerfect) and databases complete the selection of available software to make Linux an excellent workstation for economists and econometricians. Programs written for other operating systems can also be used, at least on PCs running Linux. The free iBCS emulator allows one to run binaries for other Intel-based unices such as SCO or Coherent. Commercial emulators such as WABI and Executor allow one to run, respectively, MS-Windows and Macintosh software. A free emulator for MS-DOS (but not Windows) allows one to run DOS applications. But Linux might even be more suited for development work. There are free compilers or interpreters for programming languages as C, C++, Fortran, Pascal, Java, Ada, Lisp, Prolog, Modula-3, Scheme plus many more. Moreover, excellent editors, debuggers and development tools make for a superb programming and development environment.

We conclude the review with a list of some of the major sources for documentation of Linux. As the ongoing developement of Linux itself is undertaken almost exclusively via the Internet, it is fitting that a large number of resources can be found on the Net, and the World Wide Web. particular. There are hundreds of sites that regroup information for Linux, including many that are aimed specifically at academic and scientific purposes. Several dozen mailing lists are available, both for beginners and developers, as well as about ten Usenet newsgroups that are exclusively devoted to Linux.

Scheduled for Session 5.6 Computer Languages - I