--- "Andrey G. Grozin" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Right. Taken together, these libraries can be a good substitute for > the NAG library which could be used from the commercial Axiom. It > would be great to be able to do efficient numeric calculations > inside a larger Axiom program, using these 3 excellent libraries.
Hmm. Actually, we might even be able to use the documentation for the NAG libraries to do a feature for feature comparison, and working off of these libraries add in whatever we need to achieve feature parity (although probably not, at least right away, performance parity.) > There is a tricky point, however. GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is > licensed under GPL (not LGPL). Therefore, Axiom linked with GSL > (either statically or dynamically) is automatically under GPL. A > historical example: the author of CLISP was forced (by RMS) to > change its license to GPL, because it uses readline. This was my > argument when I advocated using GPL for Axiom in the beginning of > the project. I'll have to look at GSL more carefully. Depending on how extensive it really is, perhaps using the documentation (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/gsl-ref_toc.html) and papers describing the original ideas as a guide for implementing the functionality in Axiom itself is a viable way to go - we also get a literate document by default, that way. I know GSL is fairly extensive in its coverage but I don't know how difficult the ideas are to implement - once we have a design outlined and features we want identified from GSL, NAG, and any other relevant libraries it might be a fairly smooth process. I'd really rather not get into the whole GPL wrangle again, and from the 30 year horizon perspective it might be better to focus on finding desirable features and implementing them in Axiom, rather than risk another 100 emails on licensing issues. Cheers, CY __________________________________ Yahoo! FareChase: Search multiple travel sites in one click. http://farechase.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list Axiom-developer@nongnu.org http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer