Fwd: OO Numerical methods

This was on the VAST newsgroup.
At CS4, Roger, Jeff, and I purposely used Joe's LGPL'ed VW
code as the basis of our ports to Dolphin, VAST, VW7 and
Squeak so that the ports would also be LGPL'ed.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
People of the Smalltalk Camps have ported the code of my book on Object
Oriented Numerical Methods to various dialects of Smalltalk. I include the
announcement made by Roger Whitney below for reference.

I take the opportunity to express my public gratitude to all the nice people
who worked on this project.

Cheers,

Didier

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DBH Numerical Analysis

History

This code orginially is from Object-Oriented Implementation of Numerical

Methods by Didier Besset, Morgan Kaufmann, 2001. The code was written by

Didier Besset for VisualAge Smalltalk (VAST). Joseph Whitesell

([hidden email]) ported the code to VisualWorks 3 (VW3). At Camp

Smalltalk 3 2001 Paolo Lorri, Adrain van Os (adriaan.dyndns.org) and

Roger Whitney ([hidden email]) ported the VW3 code to VW 5i and

Squeak. After Camp Smalltalk 3 Joseph Whitesell merged his work and CS3

code in the VW 3 version. Sean Glazier ([hidden email]) fixed some

problems with the VW5i4 code from CS3. At Camp Smalltalk 4 2002 Donald

MacQueen ([hidden email]), Jeff Hallman ([hidden email]) and Roger

Whitney ported the numerical code to Dolphin 4, VAST 6, VW7 and Squeak

3.2. Claus Gittinger ported the code to Smalltalk/X.



License


Joseph Whitesell worked with Didier Besset and Morgan Kaufmann to get

permission to release code base on his port under the GNU Library or

Lesser General Public License (LGPL). See

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html for more information on LGPL.



Location

The versions of the numerical code for different Smalltalk versions can

be found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhbnumerics/.



Bug Reports

Report problems at http://sourceforge.net/projects/dhbnumerics/



SUnit Tests

Each port has a set of SUnit tests which test the numerical methods. In

most ports the tests are in separate files. These tests use SUnit 3.0. A

few of the tests, the cluster tests, will fail occasionally. This is a

problem with the tests. A random starting point is used. With some

initial conditions the algorithms converge to an incorrect answer.



VW 5i & 7

Besset developed in VisualAge for Smalltalk which does not have name

spaces. The class names have the prefix 'Dhb' to avoid name clashes.

Since VW contains name spaces, the 'Dhb' prefix was removed from the

classes and the classes put into the NumericalMethods name space. So in

all other ports one uses:

DhbFloatingPointMachine new machinePrecision

while in VW 5i & VW 7 one uses:

NumericalMethods.FloatingPointMachine new machinePrecision


Using an import one can drop "NumericalMethods."



Documentation

See Object-Oriented Implementation of Numerical Methods, Didier Besset,

Morgan Kaufmann, 2001 for documentation on using this code.



Loading the Files

Each port uses standard methods (file-ins, parcels, dat) for storing the

code. Reading the files into an image should be a standard process for

any experienced Smalltalker.

----

Roger Whitney Mathematical & Computer Sciences Department

[hidden email] San Diego State University

http://www.eli.sdsu.edu/ San Diego, CA 92182-7720

(619) 583-1978

(619) 594-3535 (office)

(619) 594-6746 (fax)