Re: multi-variate distribution

[Ulrich Drepper <drepper at gmail dot com>]

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 6:03 AM, Paolo Carlini <paolo.carlini@oracle.com> wrote:
> In general I agree with Daniel that additional distributions are great
> (assuming we do the work in ext/, as already discussed).

Everything is in ext/


> One minor detail
> would be that in the past, with Gaby too, we agreed that code in ext should
> stil use "uglified" names, in principle. Thus, eg, __beta_distribution. Do
> you see a problem with that?

No technical problem.  This seems to be a rather fragmented policy.
Most extension seem not to have the uglification.  I would agree with
this for common names which are not used anywhere else in the library
(for namespace reasons).  Also for code that will not have any chance
to make it into the standard I'd agree it's the right thing to do.
The sfmt engine is far superior in performance to any other with
similar quality, the beta distribution is reasonably important and
really not that difficult to implement.  The multi-variate normal
distribution is probably the most important distribution.  Pretty much
every non-trivial MCMC simulation has to use it or implement it
something on its own.  Uglifying the names in ext/ unconditionally
means that if the code is promoted code actually has to be changed
(more).  The name already has a leading __ in the namespace and the
unique identifiers used are sufficiently special and long to not cause
any conflicts.

If the consensus is to use leading __ for the classes I can change it.
 But I'd like to be convinced, too.


> Another minor detail, I think it would be nice
> to have a minimum of testcases together with the code, just basing things
> like explicit instantiations, check the typedefs, a minimum of generation,
> just to be sure that nothing is trivially broken for some reason.

I added those for all the code.  Sending the tests as part of the
patch to review would have been to distracting, there is nothing
special in those files.