GSoC Idea: Wrapping numerical libraries

Wrapping numerical libraries

AM As mentioned on the Tclode page I have been playing with the idea to wrap a lot of existing numerical libraries (some written in the venerable FORTRAN 77 programming language, others in C). For C we have Critcl to facilitate the wrapping, for FORTRAN we can use my Wrapfort (in my ftcl project on SourceForge [L1 ]). The problem with many of these libraries is not so much the wrapping in itself, but the design of the interface.

For example, wrapping the LAPACK library (see wrapper extension for LAPACK) is a lot of work because there are so many routines. However, a lot of it can be automated (I have done that part already). The next step is to make the interface Tclish enough: The routines require the dimensions of arrays to be passed explicitly. If you map Tcl lists to arrays (or use byte arrays for efficiency), then the dimensions can be deduced from the data. So the interface exposed by the wrapper can be simpler.

A second part of the work is to package the source code with appropriate make files