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6 Rationale and history

The library is developed as a back-end for “Numerical Analysis” course taught during 1999/2000, 2000/2001 and 2001/2002 school years at Department of Mathematics, University of Belgrade. Most numerical libraries (library accompanying “Numerical Recipes” book most notably example) are asking programmer to write corresponding C code when it comes to evaluate mathematical functions. It seemed to me that it would be more appropriate (well, at least for above mentioned course) to have library that will make possible to specify functions as strings and then have them evaluated for given variable values, so I wrote first version of library during November 1999. Fortran interface is added to the library later; during January 2001 interface for Pacific Sierra VAST Fortran 90 translator was implemented and during September 2001 it was replaced by interface for Intel Fortran 90 compiler ¹. This library eventually went into rather stable state and was tested by number of other programs implementing various numerical methods and developed for the same course.

After completing engagement with this course, I thought it may be interesting for someone else to use this code and decided to make it publicly available. So, having some spare time during June 2002, I re-wrote whole library in preparation for public release, now employing simpler overall design and also using GNU auto-tools and what else was necessary according to GNU guidelines. The benefit is that final product looks much better now (well, at least to me and at least at the very moment of this writing), the drawback is that code is not thoroughly tested again. But certainly author would be more than happy to further improve and maintain it. Please see Bugs, for contact information.

The library source code was hosted on Savannah (http://savannah.gnu.org/) since Septembar 2002. In September 2003, library officially became part of GNU project.