f2cl, cernlib, and maxima (Re: [Maxima] Release plans)

The ACM software copyright is on this page:
http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_policy/softwareCRnotice.html
and contacting them by permissions@acm.org is suggested
for commercial use.

Since GPL pretty much makes commercial use impossible,
I think there is not much issue. Maxima is not commercial.
But I'm not a lawyer, so feel free to check!

As an author, I prefer the ACM position to GPL, in that it doesn't require
me to turn over copyright to FSF, and it doesn't have the
coercive nature of GPL.

I believe that ACM is protective of users and authors,
but admits of the possibility that a role can be played
by commercial enhancement of software, under license.
In which case the intellectual originators of the software
can possibly be paid royalties, even while non-commercial
uses are free.  This newsgroup is not the place to debate
GPL, however.
Back to technicalities:


There is a key difference in the numerical software (claims)
of Mathematica vs this other stuff.  Mathematica numerics
  are all variable-precision, and so one can crank up the
accuracy of any of their functions. You should be aware
of this.   I'm not sure what Maple does for special functions.
Macsyma has bigfloats, but only for rational operations plus
sin/cos/exp/log/atan.  We could get more by importing mpfun
bigfloats.

There is also a problem in mapping notions like
IEEE-infinity and IEEE-not-a-number into the symbolic
part of Maxima.


RJF


Raymond Toy wrote:

>>>>>>"Ole" == Ole Rohne <ole.rohne@cern.ch> writes:
>>>>>>
> 
>     Ole> I'm under the impression that CERNLIB is not very rich in the
>     Ole> special-function area; I recall having resorted to TOMS for things
>     Ole> like complex gamma function and hypergeometric stuff (CERNLIB is the
>     Ole> default around here :-). Maybe I just didn't look hard enough...
> 
> Well, we already have a complex gamma function, created from scratch.
> 
> I think CERNLIB has the special functions that maxima wants to use
> like Bessel functions, and some exponential integrals.  In fact,
> CERNLIB is the only place I know of that has functions for elliptical
> integrals with complex arguments.
> 
>     Ole> CERNLIB is not just plain FORTRAN-77, at least it doesn't look like
>     Ole> it. The #ifdef's are there to make it run on whatever platform CERN
>     Ole> has used almost since 1954:-) I guess you can handle this with 
>     Ole> $ cpp -DCERNLIB_LINUX -DCERNLIB_UNIX -DCERNLIB_LNX -DCERNLIB_QMGLIBC
> 
> Yep.
> 
>     Ole> The CERNLIB functions generally depend on common "utilities" for error
>     Ole> reporting etc, but that might not be so much the case in mathlib. At
>     Ole> any rate, such "utilities" would have to be dealt with manually
>     Ole> because blindly translating everything could lead to a terrible bloat.
> 
> I have not looked into this, and I think if it were needed, I'd just
> write the core error routines in lisp so that we do something sensible
> in the context of maxima.
> 
>     >> I'm open to suggestions for other sources.  
> 
>     Ole> SLATEC is in www.netlib.org and seems complete, but I couldn't find
>     Ole> out about the copyright/licensing policy. Actually, this is a somewhat
>     Ole> annoying issue with TOMS - you really have to look hard to find out it
>     Ole> is copyright ACM.
> 
> I will try to contact the ACM about licensing some of the TOMS
> routines for our use and pass the information to this list.
> 
>     Ole> Emacs calc is serious business even though it might not sound like it.
>     Ole> It is definitively GPL but the code seems more appropriate for a
>     Ole> (future) arbitrary precision floating point project.
> 
> Didn't know calc could do that.  Could probably translate (or even
> take as is) the lisp code and run it.  Arbitrary precision would fit
> in quite nicely with maxima.
> 
> But the bessel routines only have 8 digits of accuracy, according to
> the docs.  Maxima already has that, so this doesn't help. :-)
> 
> Ray
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