Re: OF and packages (devs please read)

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

On Thu, 2015-05-07 at 22:52 +0100, Colin Macdonald wrote:
> On 07/05/15 22:09, Carnë Draug wrote:
> >   Packages have a category, they provide extra functionality
> > for a specific aim.  The language core provides general functionalities.
> > This makes having a package for general stuff pointless
> 
> +1  I wrote my own dirac.m and heaviside.m and proposed them for core 
> because it honestly never occurred to me to look in something called 
> "general" or "specfun" or "miscellaneous"!

At risk of preaching to the choir, I will agreee general and
miscellaneous are kind of silly, but "special functions" is a term of
art with a couple centuries of history, a history which doesn't
include functions such as multinomial coefficients nor the Dirac delta
function:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_special_functions_and_eponyms

Then again, since most Matlab or Octave users seem unaware of what
are usually considered special functions, and since the term itself is
loosely defined, I suppose it's no better than "general".