Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
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From: vpcsc4@sfsuvax1.sfsu.edu (Emmett McLean)
Subject: Re: Links to subroutine packages
Message-ID: <1993Apr17.203923.18280@csus.edu>
Sender: news@csus.edu
Organization: San Francisco State University
References: <1993Apr16.204840.23634@ll.mit.edu>
Date: Sat, 17 Apr 1993 20:39:23 GMT
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In article William Gilson writes:
>Apologies if this has been asked already, but I would like to ask if one can link J 
>to standard scientific subroutine packages, such as EISPACK, LINPACK, etc.?  

I do not know of anyone working on a J to LINPACK
or EISPACK interface. Since these packages are written in
FORTRAN one might approach this from the point of view of
either (1) using f2c or (2) calling compiled fortran. My guess
is that the f2c approach, once suggested by Sam Sirlin, provides
the most portable alternative.

In any case, you will need to be up to speed on the specifics
of how J represents nouns internally and how stores are made
in LinkJ. You will have to determine how to translate complex number 
representations in these packages into J.

I'll spare you the details, since I haven't figured it all out,
but I've had difficulties stepping though a LinkJ version of J via gdb 
on the NeXT. So depending on your machine, it may not be so easy to
take a learn-while-you-step&debug approach.

Emmett
