Re: GSL API design flaws

[James Amundson <amundson at fnal dot gov>]

Brian Gough wrote:

> The goal of the project is really just to provide a free library
> equivalent to existing proprietary libraries such as IMSL, NAG and
> Numerical Recipes.  So we just follow the existing conventions from
> these libraries with some minor improvements.
> 
> There are a couple of other Free Numerical Library projects, SL++ and
> COLT, which go beyond what we're doing in terms of design,
> vector/matrix representations and linear algebra.

As a sarcastic comment, I couldn't agree more. Unfortunately, I'm afraid
the sarcasm might be lost on casual readers of this list. A great deal
of work went in to the design of GSL. Unfortunately, very little of it
has been discussed on this list. Even less appears in the documentation.
Please don't be fooled into thinking that a bunch of mindless drones are
re-typing Numerical Recipes. The GSL authors have worked much harder
than that.

If you would like to better understand the design decisions in GSL, the
easiest way to learn is to ask questions on this list. If you think you
think you have found simple solutions to the hard problems posed in
designing a numerical library, you haven't thought about it hard enough
yet.

--Jim Amundson