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From: Simon Wright <simon@pushface.org>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Community Input for the Maintenance and Revision of the Ada
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Date: Tue, 29 Aug 2017 09:17:33 +0100
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Date: 2017-08-29T09:17:33+01:00
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faryumg@gmail.com writes:

> Ada 2005 added standardized real-valued vectors and matrices and a
> little bit of linear algebra. Awesome. What is really needed is native
> bindings to full high-level libraries of linear algebra: BLAS, LAPACK,
> possibly via Atlas. These are super stable and have been used for
> decades in Fortran and C. Bindings exist but are too hard to grok and
> not built-in.

My Ada 2005 Math Extensions project[1] is a minimal extension of the
Annex G facilities for asymmetric and non-Hermitian matrices. Other than
that, there are at least

* AdaLAPACK[2], which uses automatically (mainly?) generated bindings to
  the LAPACK sources, and uses convention Fortran (last code update 5
  years ago).

* Ada-Lapack[3], which contains native code mainly generated by machine
  translation (last update 4 years ago).

[1] http://gnat-math-extn.sourceforge.net/index.html/
[2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/adalapack/
[3] https://sourceforge.net/projects/ada-lapack/

> Also, high-level math and special function libraries are needed such
> as the GNU Scientific Library or even the Octave libraries. Some will
> question whether these are appropriate to include in the language
> proper and that is a valid conversation. But it is things like this
> that will help get Ada away from the "embedded" stereotype.

I suppose such an effort could be under the auspices of the (archived)
Numerics Working Group[4]? or a reconstituted version? Perhaps something
like the Ada Bindings WG[5]?

[4] http://www.sigada.org/wg/numwg/numwg.html
[5] http://www.sigada.org/wg/abwg/abwg.html