preliminary version of orthopoly



I placed a _preliminary_ version of orthopoly, a proposed update 
to specfun, on 

http://www.unk.edu/acad/math/people/willisb/ 

Either download the archive orthopoly-0.9.tar.gz or view the user 
documentation at 

http://www.unk.edu/acad/math/people/willisb/orthopoly-doc.html 

(1) _Expect_ _bugs_. Orthopoly is a complete rewrite of specfun. 
I think I had sufficient reasons for starting over; you all can 
judge my sanity. 

(2) orthopoly passes essentially the same testing routine as does 
specfun. I removed a few tests  that were no longer relevant and 
I added some new tests. 

(3) I've tested orthopoly under Maxima 5.9.0rc3 (Linux cmucl) and 
Maxima 5.9.0 (XP GCL  2-5.0). 

(4) New features: 

    (a) display and TeX support, 
    (b) improved floating point evaluation with an estimate of 
        the upper bound of error. 

Additionally, I made algorithmic improvements.  Now most all symbolic and 
numerical evaluation is funneled through the 1F1 and  2F1 hypergeometric 
functions. 

(5) Send me bug reports.  When I think orthopoly is fairly well-tested, 
I'll change its version identifier  to 1.0 and let you all decide what to 
do with it. 

Yeah! Aren't you glad this isn't another COW (can of worms) missive?   
Or at least I hope that it isn't! 

Barton