Re: GSL 2.0 roadmap (one man's view)

[Brian Gough <bjg at gnu dot org>]

>    As a kind of apology for this state of affairs, the functions attempt
>    to estimate errors, using heuristic and sometimes ill-defined methods.
>    This turns out to be a poor apology, since it tends to gum-up the
>    works for the whole sublibrary, eating performance and occupying
>    a large piece of intellectual real estate.
> 
>    The error estimation code must, at the least, be factored out. More
>    to the point, is should likely be discarded in the main line of
>    development. Other notions of error control should be investigated.

I have found the error estimates to be pretty useful when debugging,
and they are only a small extra cost.

Some of the hypergeometric functions are difficult to understand in
places.  Here it would be good to have an explicit higher-level
version of the C implementation, for example in Maxima, that one could
test against and understand more easily.