Re: GMP + Octave Interpreter

[pkienzle]

On 1 Nov 2003 at 7:21, Tomer Altman wrote:

> Hey Paul,
> 
> Some points:
> 
> * Thanks; I just wanted to get a sense of what state GMP functionality
>   was in.

GMP, CLN and GiNaC all compile and test on cygwin,
though I had to skip a couple of the GiNaC tests since
they were too big for the compiler to handle.  I built the
symbolic toolbox, but could not run it for some reason.
I will try again later.

> * I guess I'm thinking very ambitiously about arbitrary precision
>   calculations, and their potential. I'm sure there are many
>   situations where someone would love to eek out more precision than
>   what their hardware provides. For example, is it possible to have an
>   entire matrix of 128-bit floating-point numbers, and perform matrix
>   manipulations/calculations on them, just as with other data types?

I haven't used the symbolic toolbox matrix support.  I believe
it has symbolic matrices but the not arbitrary precision
matrices.

> * I guess that I think that GMP is mature enough to add to the main
>   Octave package separately, even if it was originally added for GiNaC
>   support. It would be very useful for Number Theory, Cryptography,
>   Symbolic calculations, and any situation where the user should be
>   able to demand greater precision, even at the cost of performance
>   penalty.

Does gmp define trig and exponential operations?

All the functionality of LAPACK would need to be
reimplemented.

Sounds like a lot of work.

> * In general, is there a well-defined process by which mature parts of
>   OctaveForge are merged into the main Octave package? 

No.

>   How does it work? 

John takes things or reimplements things from octave-forge
and the next time I build a categorical index, I'm informed
that an octave function is shadowed by octave-forge.

>   Also, does anyone have an idea of what percentage of Octave
>   users also download OctaveForge ( as gleaned from the ratio of
>   downloads of the two projects ) ?

I imagine the octave-forge community is much smaller.
There is no way to determine the size of either
community since anyone can redistribute the
packages.

The better solution to my mind is an archive of octave
extensions tied directly into octave so that users
can discover what packages are available and
download them as needed.  However, to date nobody
has put such a beast together.

Paul Kienzle
address@hidden



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