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Date:Mon Apr 15 17:11:25 2000 
Subject:GSL interface: another Pop-11 development task? 
From:Aaron Sloman see text for reply 
Volume-ID:1000415.01 

[To reply replace "Aaron.Sloman.XX" with "A.Sloman"]

I recently learnt about the GNU Scientific Library (GSL)

    http://sourceware.cygnus.com/gsl

GSL is free. It is distributed under the terms of GPL

It provides a collection of routines for numerical computing, all
written in ANSI C, "to present a modern Applications Programming
Interface (API) for C programmers, while allowing wrappers to be written
for very high level languages."

It has a large collection of general purpose mathematical routines

The web page says

   "GSL is currently in developers release, for people who want to work on
   the library itself. When the library is complete and fully tested it
   will be announced for general use."

The draft online manual says:

   As of 3 December 1999, the complete packages are
    the random number suite (see section Random Number Generation),
        includes a large collection of random number distributions

    the quadrature package (see section Numerical Integration),

    the FFT package (see section Fast Fourier Transforms (FFTs)),

    the simulated annealing package (see section Simulated Annealing)

    the root finding package (see section Solutions of Nonlinear
        Equations).

    Work is under way on a special function library.

It occurs to me that it should be possible for some knowledgeable person
or persons to produce a nice pop-11 interface to that whole suite.
There would be two main tasks:

    (a) produce a Pop-11 interface to each of the functions, with
    very brief documentation.

    (b) design and implement a good way to incorporate the GSL
    documentation in one or more convenient forms (which should be
    very easy starting from the existing documentation in html).
    E.g. in Ved I often do the equivalent of

        ENTER lynx -width 500 -dump <URL or file name>

    to fetch a local or remote html file into VED in a nice format.
    See
        http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/auto/ved_www.p

A further development might be to produce nice connections with
David Young's LIB RC_GRAPHPLOT though perhaps most of that would
follow automatically from the pop-11 interface.
    See TEACH RC_GRAPHPLOT, or
    http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/doc/popxteach/rc_graphplot

Aaron
==
Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs/ )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK
EMAIL A.Sloman AT cs.bham.ac.uk   (ReadATas@please !)
PAPERS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/cogaff/
TOOLS: http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/poplog/freepoplog.html