Re: GSL Shell software announcement

[steve donovan <steve.j.donovan@...>]

On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 12:38 PM, Francesco Abbate
<francesco.bbt@gmail.com> wrote:
> The wiki could be a good idea but I don't know how to set it up. Otherwise I
> still think that interested people can do a little effort and commit to the
> SVN repository a properly formatted .txt files. It is very easy for everyone
> to get in and it will assure an higher level of quality for the
> documentation.

The doc source seems to be easy to edit. It's easy to build from
source, but (as I said) you have to use the Lua includes packaged in
the contained Lua source distribution, because of the LNUM patch.

A few first impressions:

1) It would be cool if lgsl were available as a regular Lua module,
but it does require a LNUM-complex patched Lua.  Perhaps if it used
something like lhf's lcomplex, it could be more generally used?

2) The contents of the math table are all made global (there is in
fact no 'math' table anymore). OK, I can see the temptation, but most
Lua users are now used to bringing in math functions they need from
math. This will also bite you if you decide to override functions like
exp() to work on vectors/matrices. (A fast map function would be
useful, otherwise)

3) A general remark about namespaces; everything is in the global
namespace, except when it isn't (like fft).  Again, it is probably
good practice to put global things like new() into a table like lgsl

4) Matrices are indexed beginning at zero, which was a little suprise!
 I know there are fierce wars about this, but having two conventions
hanging around is not good.

steve d.