**4.2 Industrial and commercial alternatives**

Almost all the above-reported applications were developed in mathematical scripting languages, such as MATLAB and its free clones; see e.g. (Lesage, 2009). They certainly offer unparalleled advantages in the design of academic prototypes but are often not well-suited to deliver tools for real-world applications. Main constraints include the inherent slowness of interpreted languages, external dependencies with other third-party toolboxes and prohibitive licensing or pricing terms.

Two alternatives can be identified when economic constraints are critical: (1) developing the entire application from scratch in compiled languages such as Fortran and C, probably incorporating freely available numerical and graphical libraries, see for instance (Ottemöller et al., 2011); and (2) developing programs in high-level and free numerical languages such as OCTAVE and SCILAB, from where stand-alone compiled routines can be invoked, see (Laverde & Manzo, 2009) for an example.

A reasonable trade-off between affordability and performance is offered by a number of commercial software packages that also maintain the advantage of a faster development time in a scripting environment. PERCLASS —formerly PRSD STUDIO— allows the design and easy deployment of PR systems and has proved to be a successful solution in a variety of industrial applications4. It is based on the MATLAB platform and follows the style of PRTOOLS (Duin et al., 2007), an academic toolbox for PR, but is not dependent on it. Another possibility is using the SIGNAL PROCESSING TOOLBOX together with the STATISTICS TOOLBOX, both by MATHWORKS, and translating the codes to platform-independent files such as DLLs.
