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suggestions for improving GSL
- To: gsl-discuss at sourceware dot cygnus dot com
- Subject: suggestions for improving GSL
- From: Brook Milligan <brook at biology dot nmsu dot edu>
- Date: Tue, 28 Mar 2000 15:09:25 -0700 (MST)
As a user of the GSL, I have a few suggestions of areas where
enhancement would be really useful.
- add an appropriate set of covariance functions to the statistics
support; these would be exactly analogous to the several variance
functions, but would take as arguments 2 (not 1) list of values. In
fact, the variance functions could be written to simply call the
covariance functions with suitable arguments.
- add multidimensional minimization to the set of optimization
functions. A candidate that I have found useful and easy to
implement is described in Press, William H. and Teukolsky, Saul
A. and Vetterling, William T. and Flannery, Brian P.
1992. Numerical Recipies in C. The art of scientific computing.
Second Edition. Cambridge University Press, New York, New York.
Section 10.4. Downhill simplex method in multidimensions. Pages
408-412. That might be a good start, though Press et al. also
provide other ideas that could be added as well. Note that if this
is done, some capability (e.g., another function in addition to the
one to be minimized) is required to specify whether points are
within the domain of the function to be minimized; the published
algorithm simply assumes that the domain extends throughout the
entire N-dimensional space.
- add extern "C" { ... } to the header files so that other languages
can be easily used in conjunction with the GSL.
Please consider these ideas. I think they would provide a significant
enhancement of the utility of the GSL.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Brook