RE: [boost] Standardization of quaternion, octonion, and specialfunction libs?

From: Paul A. Bristow (boost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2002-05-25 01:53:04

I strongly second this view.  A wide range of numerics and statistics
problame require ALL
the components of matrix, BLAS, and LAPACK, eigenthings, FFT,
and a full set of C++ math and stats functions, including quaternion,
octonion, and many others,
(and math constants of course)
which are _fully_integrated_

before C++ will get many users.

So there is a chicken and egg problem here.

Only Boost looks likely to lay the miracle egg!

Paul

Dr Paul A Bristow, hetp Chromatography
Prizet Farmhouse
Kendal, Cumbria
LA8 8AB      UK
[phone]
Mobile [phone]
mailto:pbristow_at_[hidden]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: boost-bounces_at_[hidden]
> [mailto:boost-bounces_at_[hidden]]On Behalf Of Toon Knapen
> Sent: Friday, May 24, 2002 3:15 PM
> To: boost_at_[hidden]
> Subject: Re: [boost] Standardization of quaternion, octonion, and
> specialfunction libs?
>
>
> On Friday 24 May 2002 15:32, Beman Dawes wrote:
> > Yesterday I had lunch with Hubert Holin, who was in the US to
> present at a
> > conference.
> >
> > We had some discussion about him submitting a proposal to the
> C++ committee
> > to standardize his Boost quaternion, octonion, and special function
> > libraries.
> >
> > One of the key issues is the level of interest from the numerics
> > community.  There just isn't any way this (or any other
> numerics proposal)
> > will be accepted by the committee without support from the numerics
> > community.
>
> This is actually a structural problem. Engineers in numerics
> focus mostly on
> the numerics and mostly don't care for the best possible
> implementation from
> a software engineering point of view. Therefor, few numerics guys
> or others
> using a lot of numerics in their developments, generally don't know about
> boost or other great libraries/techniques/papers out
> (for example, if you know how many people buy the RogueWave
> matrix library
> but on the other hand how few are using ublas or MTL or ...).
>
> And this gives us a dead-lock situation. Many people programming numerics
> complain that e.g. C++ does not provide matrices but fortran-90 does.
> (resulting in computer-science departments using either
> fortran-90 or Java).
> But OTOH, as you explain, C++ will not provide these features if
> there are
> not many users out there.
>
> Thus the commitee should, when deciding upon supporting features
> which are
> not purely in the software-engineering domain, not take the
> number of current
> users of the specific feature into account but the number of people that
> actually need that functionality.
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