Re: GSL API design flaws

["Gregory R. Warnes" <warnes at biostat dot washington dot edu>]

On Mon, 17 Jul 2000, James Amundson wrote:

  JA>> Brian Gough wrote:
  JA>> 
  JA>> > The goal of the project is really just to provide a free library
  JA>> > equivalent to existing proprietary libraries such as IMSL, NAG and
  JA>> > Numerical Recipes.  So we just follow the existing conventions from
  JA>> > these libraries with some minor improvements.
  JA>> > 
  JA>> > There are a couple of other Free Numerical Library projects, SL++ and
  JA>> > COLT, which go beyond what we're doing in terms of design,
  JA>> > vector/matrix representations and linear algebra.
  JA>> 
  JA>> As a sarcastic comment, I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, I'm afraid
  JA>> the sarcasm might be lost on casual readers of this list. A great deal
  JA>> of work went in to the design of GSL. Unfortunately, very little of it
  JA>> has been discussed on this list. Even less appears in the documentation.
  JA>> Please don't be fooled into thinking that a bunch of mindless drones are
  JA>> re-typing Numerical Recipes. The GSL authors have worked much harder
  JA>> than that.
  JA>> 
  JA>> If you would like to better understand the design decisions in GSL, the
  JA>> easiest way to learn is to ask questions on this list. If you think you
  JA>> think you have found simple solutions to the hard problems posed in
  JA>> designing a numerical library, you haven't thought about it hard enough
  JA>> yet.
  JA>> 
  JA>> --Jim Amundson
  JA>>