This may be a snippet from a question I submitted. Thanks for replying. There are many values of arguments for the Hypergeometric function for which it does not reduce to another special function. So in a nutshell that was the use case, a generic hypergeometric function that could not be expressed as another special function.
Also, in my post I mentioned that the boost documentation listed these as unsupported TR1 functions. Can you clarify what this means? Does TR1 handle hypergeometric functions?
Yes, they were added to the TR1 spec. However, that's part of the TR that did not make it into C++11 and to my knowledge no one has actually implemented them for the reasons I gave. I believe GSL has them (http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/manual/html_node/Hypergeometric-Functions.ht...), but once you dig into the code there are lots of comments to the effect that they don't always behave well in some regions - and that's just the bits they've managed to test - to repeat, a function with > 3 real valued args is untestable over the whole domain, that's *why* they're broken down into more precisely defined functions. Regards, John.