Re: questions about block/vector/matrix

[Brian Gough <bjg@gnu.org>]

At Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:11:26 -0600,
Gerard Jungman wrote:
At Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:11:26 -0600,
Gerard Jungman wrote:
> It is worth mentioning at this point that std::valarray is a
> recognized failure. The implementations could never live up
> to the intentions. See many discussions on the web, including
> an admission from the designer of valarray that it is a
> failure. It is best not to invoke valarray as a
> justification for any design choice; 

Yes, gsl_block was written in 1999, so I am just describing the reason
it was done like that at the time.  

While it's not essential, I don't think it's a bad principle to have
wrapper around malloc.

> This does not address the point, which is that the name of a
> function like gsl_vector_alloc_from_vector() is inappropriate,
> since it is not clear what is being "alloced".

That is an old undocumented function, not intended for actual use as
far as I'm aware.  Ideally it should have been removed.  The header
files no doubt contain bits of old junk.

The best description of the vectors and matrices is in the manual,
where I've written what should be the clearest description of how they
are meant to be used and some simple examples of the view functions.

The challenge for any scheme is getting reasonable const behavior in
C.  If that problem can be solved better then everything else follows
more easily.