Difference between revisions of "NumLib"

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Revision as of 07:33, 14 August 2020

Numlib is a numerical package in the TP dialect.

History

During the early nineties, I did my numeric math classes using this library. About a decade later (2003?), because of an existing contact with mr Tom Verhoeff, I asked him if the lib still existed. He contacted the original authors, and was able to provide a copy of the manual, and a backup of the authors working directory (the author was retired iirc), as well as verbal permission to release the package under FPC's LGPL license.

I cleaned up most of the sources in 2003-2004, and in 2005 I got some feedback, patches and help with the documentation from Darius Blaszijk (Jedi-Math). However that stopped, Darius' help was invaluable though, since I received back critical sources from him, after my house was broken into, and my computer was stolen.

During early 2010 I mentioned the package on the German lazarusforum, and decided to give it a boost.

Unfortunately I no longer had the scanned copy from the manual, so I'm redoing that work bit by bit (and put it on the FPC server this time)

List of sources

I originally received three items:

  1. a directory with the main sources.
  2. a separate directory with examples, the data file the examples operate on and tex sources.
  3. a printed copy of the manual.

The printed copy is newer than the Tex sources of the manual, but the author didn't have the sources of that revision. The library sources are newer than both the source docs as the printed docs. All documentation is in a very mathematically formal Dutch.

These three sources will have to be linked and made consistent, and the "tex" document sources needs to be updated to a more modern "latex" dialect, and enhanced/corrected with the (more recent) scans of the printed version. The already finished units can be used as a template.

When this is finished, a classes based interface could be added.

units status

This process has been done for two smaller units:

  • iom unit to read and write vector
  • inv unit to calculate inverse of matrices.

organization

The src/ directory in the package contains the main numlib sources, the examples/ directory contains already converted examples, and doc/ contains already converted documentation (still needs work though). The tests/ directory contains some tests.

Documentation

See: NumLib Documentation