Re: [Matlisp-users] Re: Matrix column access

[Raymond T. <ray...@er...>]

>>>>> "Nicolas" == Nicolas Neuss <Nic...@iw...> writes:

    Nicolas> Raymond Toy <ray...@er...> writes:
    >> Not quite sure what you mean by automating the process of making the
    >> routines available.  Someone has to figure out the function signature
    >> to tell Lisp how to call it.  And some of the functions take
    >> characters or strings, and that is very dependent on the Fortran
    >> compiler.  Same with returning complex values.

    Nicolas> Does this mean that interfacing to Fortran libraries is ill-defined?  Maybe
    Nicolas> one should use the C-interface of BLAS/LAPACK then?

Perhaps.  Replacing them all would be quite a bit of work, though.  Is
the C interface just that and you still have to use Fortran for 
BLAS/LAPACK, so you get another layer?

I think the standard used by Matlisp is the standard for the old
portable f77 compiler, which is used by g77 and Sun f77, so it's not
so bad.  I suspect that I'm the only one who uses something other than
g77, and I don't do that very often either.

For the record, Fortran strings are represented as basically C
strings, and the length of the string is appended to the list of
parameters.  Functions returning complex values actually insert a new
parameter into the arg list and this parameter is a pointer to where
the complex value should be stored.  This is probably how the C
interface works.

Ray