Jurgen Singer <jurgen@aNOcSPAMm.org> wrote:

> Equally, the ill conceived valarray is supposed to be
> used for numeric applications, but some of the most
> common operations done in scientifc codes are
> dot products - and the C++ numerics templates, like
> inner_product, require iterator arguments, which means
> they won't work with valarrays.
>
> One of the problems seems to be that the C++ Standard
> was written by computer scientist, who apparently don't
> know too much about mathematics.

The valarray class was designed by Kent Budge of Sandia, who is no slouch at
maths and physics (e.g.http://www.cs.sandia.gov/SEL/apps/energy/alegra.htm)
At the time it was state-of-the-art, but there has been such rapid progress
in C++ numerics since then that it is now outdated.  It was designed to be
easily mapped to FORTRAN implementations and to vector hardware, and still
should serve that purpose well.

Greg Colvin



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