[Matrix-SIG] Quick... Duck! (or: YA Newbie)

[Gregory A. Landrum]

On Tue, 5 May 1998, Paul F. Dubois wrote:

> It is probably straight-forward to use SWIG to do this wrapping. I haven't
> received any such wrapping to date.

I'll look at that.  I was just reading through the SWIG docs this
afternoon.

> Ideally one would not supply ANY version of LAPACK with NumPy. The

I think there's an argument for supplying something
small and simple, just to get people started.

> convenience is nice, but it is almost certain that our copy will get out of
> date or not be as efficient as a more "official" source. The unfortunate

This (efficiency) is certainly true.  Particularly since most
(all?) of the commercial unix vendors provide at least partial
implementations which tend to be rather highly optimized
for their platforms.

> I imagine, however, that if you are experienced at building Python
> extensions on your platform that you should have no real trouble removing
> the unwanted part of the distribution and linking to a library. The package
> does include instructions on how to make the package, including a Setup file
> you can modify.

Yeah, after sending my question, I decided to go rooting around
in the code to see what was what.  It does look fairly easy to
patch in my own local BLAS implementation.  Well, it will be
after I add something to fix the fact that the lapack_lite
distribution has hardcoded _'s on the ends of fortran subroutine
names.  This inconsistency is the biggest PITA in using Fortran
and C together.  

Thanks again,
-greg