Re: libevaluator library and GSL

[Juan Jose Gomez Cadenas <Juan dot Jose dot Gomez dot Cadenas at cern dot ch>]

Hi Alkesandar, just to let you know that I will include your library in my
teaching course this year. I teach a Numerical methods course for 
third-year physics students. The language is C++ and having an evaluator 
in C, easily wrapable to C++ is a very welcome tool.

Thanks for the effort. Best regards,
J.J. Gomez-Cadenas.

On Fri, 5 Sep 2003, Aleksandar B. Samardzic wrote:

> On Fri, Sep 05, 2003 at 11:38:33AM +0100, Brian Gough wrote:
> > Aleksandar B. Samardzic writes:
> >  > I've written a library
> >  > (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/libevaluator/) that makes possible
> >  > to parse strings representing mathematical functions over single or
> >  > multiple variables and later to evaluate these functions for different
> >  > variable values (also to create representation of function derivative
> >  > over specified variable etc.).  I've submitted this library for
> >  > evaluation regarding inclusion in GNU project and was told by my
> >  > evaluator that they would rather like to see my library as part of GSL
> >  > than to publish it as separate library.  My library is written in C, but
> >  > offers also Fortran 77 and Gule interfaces (as well as Fortran 90
> >  > interface). 
> > 
> > Hello,
> > 
> > Thanks for your email.  I've had a look at your package from CVS.
> > Here are my comments, which you may pass on to the GNU evaluator.
> > 
> > The question of having an expression parser in GSL came up once
> > before.
> > 
> > My opinion was that a library to do this could be useful in many
> > C programs, including those which do not require anything else in
> > GSL.
> > 
> > Having a standalone evaluator package, with minimal dependencies,
> > that is very easy for people to integrate into their program
> > could be a good strategy for encouraging people to use the GPL
> > for their software -- in the same way that the Readline library
> > does.
> > 
> > If the evaluator is part of GSL then it reduces the effectiveness
> > of this approach, because GSL is so big (probably much larger
> > than the application the evaluator would be used in) and could
> > not be distributed with the program very easily.
> > 
> > So, I would recommend having a single standalone library under
> > the GPL, standardising on ANSI C expressions, and having no
> > external dependencies (except for the standard c library), to
> > maximise the potential userbase.
> 
> 
> Brian,
> 
> Thank you for your effort and suggestions.  Since I guess you have best
> perspective here, I'll follow your suggestion and approach my evaluator
> again to re-consider having libevaluator to be separate part of GNU
> project.  Anyway, whether it will become part of GNU project or not, it
> is already available at mentioned location
> (http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/libevaluator/) and is already under
> GPL, so if anyone interested - feel free to utilize it.  I'd like also
> to thank other people that responded to my message for very useful
> suggestions regarding further work on this library.
> 
> Regards,
> Alex
>