CAD program for Gnome and GSL

[Mark Galassi <rosalia cygnus com>]

    Inigo> * the program would need several mathematics functions,
    Inigo> such as resolution of nonlineal equations set and more.  I
    Inigo> am searching for a GNU library with advanced algebraic
    Inigo> functions like the mentioned.  The best option could be gsl
    Inigo> (Mark Galassi: are you here?) but it doesn't have all the

I'm here.  I'm have a bad-ass deadline this month, but I still take a
peek at GNOME email :-)

    Inigo> [gsl does not have all the] functions I need.  Other option
    Inigo> could be to make a 'system' call to 'octave' or other
    Inigo> similar math program but I don't like this idea ...  Any
    Inigo> algebraic library out there?

Have you seen the new gsl-0.4 release (put out last weekend)?  It has
many more functions implemented.

Nonlinear *sets* of algebraic equations are not yet in there, but
there is a single equation solver :-).  One guy is writing a BLAS
package, and once that is in place a multi-dimensional Newton's method 
becomes possible.

One of the ideas behind GSL is that when we go public (not yet; we are
waiting for peer review of some fundamental components by numerical
analysts expert in each field) we will encourage the maintainers of
packages like Octave and Gnuplot to contribute their numerical bits to 
GSL so that they can leave the maintainance of that to us, and just
link to GSL.

So if Octave has the non-linear equation set solver that you really
want, you could try to fit it in GSL, or work with the Octave people
and us to do so.

One issue with Octave is that they took much of the grand old FORTRAN
numerical code from netlib and ran it through f2c and wrote some
wrappers to use those routines.  This is a great tour-de-force which
did what they needed, but it would be nicer if GSL contributors took
code from netlib and re-wrote it in C to have a nice API, like Brian
Gough did for FFTPACK.