Re: [OctDev] complex error function

[Steven G. Johnson]

Steven G. Johnson wrote:
> Daniel J Sebald wrote:
> > Have you sent someone in command of that library an email to inquire?
> > [...]
> > Because it hasn't been accepted into the standard library doesn't mean 
> > it can't be used as an extension.
>
> Not only would it be an extension (which they RARELY accept...it took 
> them years to even accept commonplace and desperately needed extensions 
> like qsort_r), but it would potentially (at least in theory) conflict 
> with future C standards (since the name is reserved but not yet 
> defined).  Not only are they almost certain to reject such a 
> contribution, I would actually agree with such a rejection: they should 
> NOT be implementing reserved C99 identifiers based on "guessed" meanings 
> (no matter how reasonable the guess).

Astonishingly to me, it seems that GNU libc actually included an 
implementation of clog10, one of the reserved names in section 7.26.1 of 
the standard, in glibc version 2.1.

So, there is some nonzero chance that they would be interested in cerf 
and cerfc (although they would probably want single and long-double 
versions as well).   I posted a query to the glibc maintainers mailing 
list about this.

(Of course, this wouldn't obviate the desire for such functions in 
Octave in any case, unless you only want to support this functionality 
with GNU libc.)

--SGJ