Re: interfacing GSL Pop11/Poplog

["E. Robert Tisdale" <edwin@netwood.net>]

Aaron Sloman wrote:

> The proposal is that a "popgsl" package
> could also become available
> with documentation and interfaces to the GSL facilities
> including hand-coded or automatically generated wrappers.
> This is analogous to the way Pop-11 currently has access
> to all the X facilities, i.e. through Pop-11 procedures
> which invoke the C procedures.
> 
> People using this popgsl package
> would probably obtain GSL separately,
> though there might be some benefit
> in providing pre-compiled saved images for some users
> (or making a stable version of GSL available
>  at the Poplog site).

The GSL developers just aren't there yet.

The hope is, as I understand it, that
the GSL API will be more or less fixed
with the release of version 1.0
The GSL developers really haven't considered
any language bindings except for ANSI C yet.
It isn't clear whether they will ever support
any other language bindings.
I guess that they would try to support C++
and Fortran 90 language bindings first
because they are the most popular languages
for numerical computing.

It might take another year or two
before the GSL developers can consider
other language bindings
but that shouldn't prevent you
from beginning work now
on a language binding for Pop-11.
You just need to expect that
any interface that you might implement
will require constant maintenance
as the GSL continues to evolve.