Re: [Help-gsl] design philosophy

[Rhys Ulerich]

Hi Gideon,

> I'm working on a project that involves both numerical integration of a system 
> of ODEs and the solution of nonlinear systems of equations, and I was 
> wondering if there was a reason that the interfaces were not better unified.  
> In particular, the ODE routines take, as arguments, double arrays, while the 
> nonlinear solvers use the gsl_vector data structure.  It's easy enough to map 
> from one to the other, but I was wondering, why not have more consistency?

>From what I have gathered by lurking on the mailing list and digging
through documentation, for logic which could be isolated from the
gsl_vector classes, double* arrays were preferred so that folks could
copy'n'paste the code without needing all of the GSL.  It is likely
the case that the nonlinear solvers require enough GSL machinery that
they could not simply be ripped out.

- Rhys