Re: [Help-gsl] Re: Question: gsl in C++ ??

[Jordi Gutierrez Hermoso]

Are we offtopic yet?

On 15/03/07, Lionel B <address@hidden> wrote:
> > (here's our chance to start indexing from 1 à la GNU Octave!)
>
> No, please!

Wow, ex-Fortran programmer objects to this? I'll make indexing from 1
optional; personally I think that it makes more sense for numerical
work since formulae usually are written 1, ..., n. Meh, not a big
deal, though. ;-)

> > We should also look into implementing gsl_vector with valarrays instead
> > of direct memory manipulation, but this might break compatibility with
> > BLAS.
>
> I think valarrays are a good idea - relieves the burden of memory
> management... and valarrays are completely BLAS-friendly too,

You seem knowledgeable about this. What do you think about the Boost
implementation of a BLAS interface? I haven't looked at the underlying
mechanics of how they're doing it, but it's probably a good idea to
build upon their work instead of attempting a C++ implementation of
GSL from scratch with valarrays.

Also, you touted the benefits of valarrays with respect to aliasing,
but it seems that even the original inventor of valarrays admits that
this might not be the case because compilers are not taking advantage
of the anti-aliasing of valarrays (I can't find the newsgroup message
where I read this).

Curious,
- Jordi G. H.