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For general numerical work, sage includes numpy/scipy. I don't have benchmarks ready for you but these are well-known numerical packages, so with this information you should be able to find comparisons quite easily. If you need to get closer to C, then Cython gives a very good path to write your inner loops with C efficiency with an minimum of interfacing and boiler plate. This is an option not available in matlab. Julia might be able to do that for you. Cython has very good support for numpy's data structures, but some reading will be required to be able to make use of it with full efficiency.

Based on that I would think python (and with that sage) is certainly a viable choice. Whether it's the best one for your application will depend on the expertise available to you (and possibly the strengths of the other packages).

As a matlab alternative there is also octave, which can interface with sage. It will probably depend on which toolkits in matlab you would like to use if that is a viable option.