GNU Scientific Library -- Design document


    Mark Galassi


    James Theiler


    Brian Gough
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   This file documents the design of GNU Scientific Library, a collection of
   numerical routines for scientific computing.

   More information about GSL can be found at the project homepage,
   [1]http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/.

   The GNU Scientific Library is a library of scientific subroutines. It aims to
   provide a convenient interface to routines that do standard (and not so standard)
   tasks that arise in scientific research. More than that, it also provides the
   source code. Users are welcome to alter, adjust, modify, and improve the
   interfaces and/or implementations of whichever routines might be needed for a
   particular purpose.

   GSL is intended to provide a free equivalent to existing proprietary numerical
   libraries written in C or Fortran, such as NAG, IMSL's CNL, IBM's ESSL, and SGI's
   SCSL.

   The target platform is a low-end desktop workstation. The goal is to provide
   something which is generally useful, and the library is aimed at general users
   rather than specialists.
     * [2]Motivation
     * [3]Contributing
          + [4]Packages
     * [5]Design
          + [6]Language for implementation
          + [7]Interface to other languages
          + [8]What routines are implemented
          + [9]What routines are not implemented
          + [10]Design of Numerical Libraries
          + [11]Code Reuse
          + [12]Standards and conventions
          + [13]Background and Preparation
          + [14]Choice of Algorithms
          + [15]Documentation
          + [16]Namespace
          + [17]Header files
          + [18]Target system
          + [19]Function Names
          + [20]Object-orientation
          + [21]Comments
          + [22]Minimal structs
          + [23]Algorithm decomposition
          + [24]Memory allocation and ownership
          + [25]Memory layout
          + [26]Linear Algebra Levels
          + [27]Exceptions and Error handling
          + [28]Persistence
          + [29]Using Return Values
          + [30]Variable Names
          + [31]Datatype widths
          + [32]size_t
          + [33]Arrays vs Pointers
          + [34]Pointers
          + [35]Constness
          + [36]Pseudo-templates
          + [37]Arbitrary Constants
          + [38]Test suites
          + [39]Compilation
          + [40]Thread-safety
          + [41]Legal issues
          + [42]Non-UNIX portability
          + [43]Compatibility with other libraries
          + [44]Parallelism
          + [45]Precision
          + [46]Miscellaneous
     * [47]Copying
     ____________________________________________________________________________

   This document was generated using the texi2html translator version 1.54.

References

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