[SciPy-dev] Do we care about the LAPACK C interface?

[Robert Kern]

On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 17:27, Travis E. Oliphant <oliphant at enthought.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> I'm sitting here in a BOF with Clint Whaley (the author of ATLAS).  He
> is looking for information about people that care about the C interface
> to LAPACK.  Do we care?
>
> I'm not clear on that.  Don't we just use the FORTRAN interfaces to ATLAS?
>
> If I hear from you soon, I can give Clint the information before I leave
> the BOF.

Query: Are you talking about just the C interface to LAPACK or the C
interface to the BLAS, too? I definitely want to keep the BLAS C
interface. It would be nice if there were a C interface to the entire
LAPACK, but I don't think that ATLAS (or anyone else) provides that
currently. That way, we would be able to worry less about mixing and
matching Fortran compilers (e.g. your distro builds ATLAS's LAPACK
with g77 and you want to use gfortran to build scipy). But since
ATLAS's LAPACK is a mixture of C and FORTRAN, I think we may be pretty
much stuck with that problem regardless.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless
enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as
though it had an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco