John Maddock <john <at> johnmaddock.co.uk> writes:
The "Math Toolkit" has now matured to the point where Paul Bristow and I would like to ask for a formal review.
Some comments before the review begins (If you allow): In the docs sometimes you have formulations like e.g. "Returns the cubed root of x.". For native speakers this may be no problem, but sqrt(x)^3 may be easier to catch for the rest of us. Also I dislike: "The definition used here is that used by Wolfram MathWorld" since by this the docs are neither self-contained nor robust against some idiot buying and shutting down the cited sites. I am sure, even wikipedia will vanish some day due to some more internet restrictions evolved from the pseudo-war against terror (alias war against freedom) or some idiot holding a software patent affecting the whole community. So rather include the full text from Wikipedia than hope it is there when my children read your docs. I learned it the hard way: data persistence is unavailable in the w^3. Citing papers is OK, but it takes a few thousand dollars to get them all I guess. So adding an outline of the algorithm would be nice for all functions (though saying what you use is GoodStuff(TM), too). Since I got really excited about gamma functions (I need them and had hard times evaluating exact solutions from continuum mechanics): The Definition section needs some rework and the warnings about the different definitions will not help much in this form (at least for me, the stupid one) I see no connection between \Int R(t, s) dt and the definitions F, E and \Pi so here again the docs are a little bit confusing and the information about gamma function definitions and what Legendre found out will not enter my brain without further information from other sources which I find odd. OTOH given these function on a silver tablet I'd like to say: Thank You! What I also dislike is the existence of default typedefs for double (students_t et al.). This is unnecessary and makes double a special type which it is not. I'd vote for removing those from the boost version of this due to the asymmetry it produces. regards, Markus