More a question for Mark Dickinson - he added math.gamma, not me ;-)
There was a bpo issue opened about this over 8 years ago, but it was
closed 6 years ago "due to lack of interest":
https://bugs.python.org/issue11012
In general, adding hairy stuff to cmath is painful, and just
minimizing the cardinality of
set(dir(math)) - set(dir(cmath))
isn't sufficient justification.
From my POV, the audience for complex gamma is relatively tiny and is
already served by popular, solid packages (like scipy and mpmath). If
someone really needs complex gamma, they probably need all sorts of
other specialized stuff too! I prefer to keep such stuff _out_ of the
core.
But people can reasonably disagree about that. In the bpo issue
linked to above, Mark said he wouldn't work on it himself, but would
be happy to review patches. Which is more than I'd be willing to do
;-)
On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 4:02 PM Guido van Rossum <gu...@python.org> wrote:
>
> That's a question for Tim Peters.
>
> On Sun, Sep 8, 2019 at 9:48 PM Andrew Barnert via Python-ideas
> <python-ideas@python.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Sep 7, 2019, at 18:07, davidgmoril...@gmail.com wrote:
>> >
>> > Since the gamma function (see
>> > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_function) is defined for complex
>> > numbers too, wouldn't it be normal to have it implemented on the `cmath`
>> > module? The `math` module has this function, but it doesn't support
>> > complex numbers (as expected).
>>
>> I believe this is just because math and cmath started off mostly thin
>> wrappers around the C stdlib functions, and C had a gamma for double but not
>> for complex.
>>
>> (Actually, IIRC, it’s a bit more complicated, more like “what POSIX
>> guaranteed that Windows also provided as of the mid 90s”, which goes beyond
>> the C89 standard but doesn’t match the C99 standard.)
>>
>> But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be added. The `math` and `cmath` modules
>> have added lots of things over the decades that are useful and aren’t thin
>> wrappers, like `fsum` and `isclose`, and hasn’t included everything that was
>> added in later versions of C or POSIX.
>>
>> In fact, math.gamma itself is effectively one of those things; it’s no
>> longer a wrapper around a libm function, but a custom Lancsoz implementation
>> that gives the same values on all platforms.
>>
>> But on the third hand, you’d presumably want cmath.gamma to give the same
>> values as math.gamma for compatible inputs. And the algorithm in
>> mathmodule.c doesn’t translate smoothly to complex. I believe libraries like
>> GSL deal with this by using a different algorithm that does translate
>> smoothly, for both real and complex values, but that means giving up either
>> speed or accuracy or both.
>>
>> I did some quick tests on scipy.special.gamma. It takes roughly 12x as long
>> as math.gamma, and gives larger errors (within 3 ulp instead of 1 even near
>> 1, and as much as 117ulp instead of no more than 10 for extreme values), and
>> doesn’t give the same values for float and complex (e.g., for 1/3, they
>> differ by 6ulp). Is that good enough for the stdlib?
>>
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>
>
> --
> --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
> Pronouns: he/him/his (why is my pronoun here?)
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