Low level language to complement python?

[Proszbje]

I've begun to put my engineering/science skills to use in the computer world. I hope to develop tools, scripts and user interfaces to control them and make my calculations and stuff easier. I chose Python as my first language, as it let's me do this fairly well, I have started some applications and UI's using PyGTK and all is going smoothly.

Thing is, given the very high level programming nature of python, running long number crunching and optimization scripts is not as quick or resource efficient as I would like.

So a question goes out to you: What low level programming language would allow me to do heavy calculating?

I've read about combining MATLAB, Python and C in order to accomplish this, what are your opinions?

[lolocaust]

C is great for that sort of thing. Fortran is also still used for a lot of computational things. I've heard good things about haskell too. C would probably be best though if you're combining it with python.

[Axiom]

C & Python is a classic combination and is used the world over on many applications.

[Rich White Male]

What can C do that python can't?

http://docs.python.org/tutorial/intr...s-a-calculator

[lolocaust]

python can likely do (nearly) everything that C can, but not as efficiently. every language has its particular strength; C's is mostly speed, which is what the OP is looking for.

for example, you wouldn't use C for text processing (perl and others are way better at that), even though it's quite possible. it's just not efficient enough.

(I'm not knocking python at all, by the way)