Re: [boost] [Review] Polynomial library review begins today

Subject: Re: [boost] [Review] Polynomial library review begins today
From: Kevin Lynch (krlynch_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-03-10 17:21:54

John Maddock wrote:
> The review of Pawel Kieliszczyk's Polynomial library begins today and 
> ends on Thurs 19th March.

This library seems to fill a fairly useful niche.  This isn't a review, 
but may turn in to one ....

1) Others have mentioned this, but I want to reiterate:  the currently 
documented behavior of the operator= and copy constructors that take 
(and modify!) std::vectors are enough by themselves to a make me vote 
against acceptance.  I expect, however, that these will be fixed. 
Actually, I don't see a need for either of them, as there are 
constructors taking InputIterators; they're much more general, of 
course, as they can construct a polynomial from any other type of sequence.

2) evaluate_polynomial() and evaluate_polynomial_faithfully() take their 
coefficient arguments in the opposite order of all the other 
functions/constructors in the library, without providing any reason for 
that choice.  That's seems somewhat surprising.  I'd suggest fixing 
that, or at the very least providing an argument in the documentation 
why this makes some sense.

3) The documentation is a bit thin, and needs a good proofreading
  a) From the examples are nothing that a competent programmer couldn't 
figure out from the declarations.  Some more interesting or useful 
examples would be nice, particularly for things like the special forms. 
  It's not exactly clear what I would do with those functions.
  b) There is no documentation or references to the various algorithms 
used.  Those, too, would be nice.

-- 
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