R-alpha: Re: pow_dd & pow_di [was f2clib.c etc..] -- yes, please !

[Ross Ihaka]

Martin Maechler writes:
 > Even more: I think it's just these two which should 
 > 	'officially' part of the R binary, i.e., their sourc should be in
 > 	src/main/  or src/math/  rather than in appl  or somewhere.
 > 
 > I think there are several instances in the current  R source tree, where
 > the code could be improved by using  pow_d{d|i}(..).

I think that there are two problems here.

 1. Providing support for functionality in the R core (all C code).

 2. Supporting code in external libraries (mainly f77).

I think it might be useful to keep these problems separate.

We can certainly put in support for a wider range of "pow" functions
and any other math functions.  Putting these in the "math" library
seems natural.

One possible solution to the second problem would be to declare that R
will work with f2c generated code and anything compatible with it.
This is pretty extreme though.  On more exotic platforms it would be
nice to use custom blas etc.

Better dyn.load support is on the way (complements of GNU dld 4) and
this may well solve problem 2 above.
	Ross
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