From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,df13d6de50be95b7 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news2.google.com!news4.google.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!newsfeed00.sul.t-online.de!newsfeed01.sul.t-online.de!t-online.de!news-in.ntli.net!newsrout1-win.ntli.net!ntli.net!news.highwinds-media.com!newspeer1-win.ntli.net!newsfe3-win.ntli.net.POSTED!53ab2750!not-for-mail From: "Dr. Adrian Wrigley" Subject: Re: Binding to the GNU Scientific Library User-Agent: Pan/0.14.2 (This is not a psychotic episode. It's a cleansing moment of clarity.) Message-ID: Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada References: <1162369489.160270.248680@e3g2000cwe.googlegroups.com> <1162559389.689389.125610@h54g2000cwb.googlegroups.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:37:02 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 82.21.99.109 X-Trace: newsfe3-win.ntli.net 1162568222 82.21.99.109 (Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:37:02 GMT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 03 Nov 2006 15:37:02 GMT Organization: NTL Xref: g2news2.google.com comp.lang.ada:7362 Date: 2006-11-03T15:37:02+00:00 List-Id: On Fri, 03 Nov 2006 05:09:49 -0800, brian.b.mcguinness wrote: > > Dr. Adrian Wrigley wrote: > ... >> And the topic impinges on the question of Ada for scientific programming >> that was discussed here a few months back. Lack of efficient library >> access is a major barrier to use in this application class. > > It seems to me that instead of having a binding to the library it would > be better to translate the library into Ada and make it a generic > package for floating point types. That would provide more flexibility, > and would probably be more efficient that having to translate back and > forth between Ada and C floating point numbers. Assuming a given level of effort, the benefit would be greater to bind Ada to an existing (debugged) library than to create one from scratch. The time saved could be devoted to improving the library, benefiting all users. Or developing your application. GSL is rather extensive now, and the more it is optimised and extended, the better. A well designed library would avoid spending time converting data formats on the interfaces. But making this accessible by generics is a bit tricky because you need to switch beween the different implementations according to precision, I think. -- Adrian