Hi,
> On Dec 25, 2014, at 12:33 , Dick Hendrickson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Unfortunately, the real (sorry) historical reason isn't very interesting.
Agreed. The conspiracies are much better reading.
>
> Basically, someone went through the then current C math library
> (I forget which one) and picked out all of the intrinsics that
> weren't already in Fortran and just added them to chapter 13.
Well, almost all. logp1, expm1, and log2 are missing.
> The argument (sorry again) was that if Fortran is the premier
> scientific programming language, then it ought to have the
> same capabilities as the competition. Presumably, the C
> people did the thinking about which functions would be used
> enough to be worth doing.
libm comes from Bell Labs, where Bessel functions likely get more use
than perhaps some other shops.
>
> Doing it this way had essentially no implementation costs for
> vendors. They all supported C; all they had to do was teach
> their Fortran compiler how to link up to a C routine.
And provide them for all kinds of real, where C compilers
only need supply two.
--
Cheers!
Dan Nagle
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