[SciPy-dev] special.cdflib questions

[Travis Oliphant]

> I am curious about the cdflib fortran modules in the special
> subdirectory of scipy: Why are there so many arguments for each
> distribution?  For example, if I want to call cdfbin to calculate a
> parameter of a binomial distribution, I should not need to supply BOTH p
> and q=1-p ... also, the status and bound arguments seem like something
> you would have returned to you, rather than passed to the function. How
> would I know the status of the calculation before its calculated?
> Finally, none of the cdf's seem to return any values, despite what the
> inline comments say.  I am obviously way confused about this code, so I
> am hoping someone out there can set me straight.
>

First, if you are interested in the cdflib library itself it is available
on the net.  It is not SciPy-written code.  We have a particular interface
to the cdflib library tailored for SciPy.

Is there a particular reason you need to use the fortran interface?


Most of the cdflib functions are written as subroutines where you can
obtain any of the arguments given all the other arguments.  Thus, for
example, the same subroutine is used to calculate the cdf and the inverse
of the cdf.

Good luck,

-Travis