Christian Holm Christensen wrote: > I'd like to direct your attention to the "GNU Scientific Library" > (GSL) developed, among others, by people from Los Alamos. This is a > very general library with many many features aimed for scientific > use. It's written in ANSI C, and is very portable. Also, it's released > under GPL, making it truely OpenSource. No wrappers in C++ exist, but > as far as I can tell, it should be fairly easy to do. For a more > complete description of the features in GSL, please look at Hi, I'd second this idea - at least as something to investigate. We've had GSL available in PHENIX for about a year and it seems to work well. One of the nice things about GSL is that it's being written by people with knowledge of numerical computing; it's not trivial to write good numerical software. I mean, I can write a series expansion for a Bessel function as well as the next guy, but I'd have a hard time guaranteeing the results are correct out to the least-significant digit. (Prof. Kahan at Berkeley has some nice papers about the myriad ways in which numerical implementations go awry: http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~wkahan/ ) GSL also has a extensive test suite to spot check the behavior of the library. It's also not quite true that there are _no_ C++ wrappers for GSL. The Fermilab folks have wrappers for the special functions part of GSL: http://www.fnal.gov/docs/working-groups/fpcltf/Pkg/SpecialFunctions/doc/SpecialFunctions.html Whether the particular way they've chosen to do things is the best way or not is a different question, but it's at least a place to start. Cheers, Dave -- David Morrison Brookhaven National Laboratory phone: 631-344-5840 Physics Department, Bldg 510 C fax: 631-344-3253 Upton, NY 11973-5000 email: dave@bnl.gov
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