Overview of numerical analysis software

So looking at alternatives to Octave, it turns out - to what should not have been my surprise - that there are a boatload of alternatives:

• Wikipedia has a nice table
• The Octave Wiki recommends Inline::Octave, which I find a little questionable, but hey.
• PDL is probably the best Perl alternative; has direct support for sparse matrices, interestingly.
• The Monks look at some comparisons between R/S, Octave, and PDL.

Again: I'd essentially like to distill the semantics out of this and have a system that knows how to code for a set of alternatives.