Re: Ada (GNAT) and GNU Scientific Library

[george@gentoo.org]

On a related note, I recently "resurrected" the cbind package. It was
one of the packages we had in portage (that's Gentoo) and which I did
not, at the time, update yet. The usual search however did not turn up
any update information. In fact all the references I found were
pointing at the location which now look dead (If anybody can give me
any pointers to anything  "official" I'd be gratefull to hear of
course). Fortunately we still had the sources on our mirrors, so I
somewhat cleaned them up and repackaged (I don't remember all the
details right now, minor stuff mostly. Most notably, I converted some
script from csh to bash, in order not to force tcsh dependency just for
one 20-liner. The rest was trivial IIRC (not that even that was hard
:))). If anybody is interested to have it you can get the repackaged
sources here:
http://dev.gentoo.org/~george/src/cbind-6.0.tar.bz2
or on any of our mirrors. Just run make to build, it only needs gcc and
make AFAICT. I intend to keep it for as long as I can "maintain" it. I
briefly tested it on some .c file - incidentally that was my attempt to
test some gsl function :), and it seemed to spit some reasonably
looking code for some gsl header file. Although I did not test this
further at the time.

There were also announcements of an ongoing effort to produce a SWIG
module, however my understanding is that is not yet finished (and IIRC
it aims at C++ bindings). Meanwhile you can try throwing cbind at the
task - it may help produce some bindings at least for the needed
functions.

George


Dr. Adrian Wrigley wrote:
> A decent binding would probably best work out if someone in the Ada
> community was actually using GSL in Ada regularly, since they
> would have working, maintained code as a base.  If that's where
> my coding is likely to go, I'll seriously consider putting it
> on a public license from the start.
> Adrian