I can't believe the GSL people invented a new interface for the one numerical interface which is now universal. Not to mention that they ignored lots of faster, free libraries like ATLAS and FFTW... what's the point of reinventing the wheel badly?
The different interface was a little unconventional, but after spending an afternoon with the manual and some example programs it didn't seem like too much hassle.
You must admit that their coverage of mathematical functions is pretty comprehensive (what other FREE library does the same thing? Netlib might have all the parts, but nothing is as comprehensive.). The sheer variety of random number generators available impressed the heck out of me (especially after using drand48() for far too long).
In my mind (and I've only used gsl for graduate research, ~20 years of CPU time spread over a few months) the main advantage of GSL is the almost everything numerical that one might need is in the library. Its also available via gnu for any processor type, so if you're scrounging for time and need to run your code on sgi, sun, linux, ibm, i386 linux, and alpha, (because that's what's available) and do your development work in osx, its no big deal to "make" with the vendor's compiler. (for a little while I tried curating 6 different makefiles to support all the vendor's different ideas about how the lapack sgetrf (L-U factorization) should be called (-lessl, - lsunmath, -llapack, -lcomplib, -lcxml, -lacml, - l_whatever_intel_called_it..... I've tried to forget where all these different libraries are stored)
Nathan - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Nathan Moore Physics, Pasteur 152 Winona State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] AIM:nmoorewsu - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
