PML user's manual for PML Version 2.0. Revision 1.

摘要

There are many mathematics libraries currently enjoying widespread use. At the time that PML was begun, however, there were very few written in C and fewer still written with portability in mind. The temptation has all too often been to program to a specific hardware platform and forget portability. More recently some very good work has been published by Press, Flannery, Teulkovsky, and Vetterling, Numerical Recipes in C, which is highly portable. No one library is apt to have everything that a given application needs and there are other considerations such as interfaces and related functionality to drive the development of a math library. The reason for writing PML hasn't changed in spite of this. PML (Portable Mathematics Library) was developed initially as a repository for any routines of a mathematical nature in what has become the PACT system. More recently, I have tried to systematize the library and organize it for future growth. The library has two fundamental parts. First are the many pure math routines such as equation solvers. Second are the structure definitions and some related functions. The structures which PML supports are provided to aid C programmers in organizing their mathematical computations in a mathematical way. That is, they are encouraged to give primary consideration to the mathematics not the implementation of the mathematics. This also is intended to add to the mathematical rigor of simulations and promote the use of some of the more abstract but critical ideas of mathematics by giving application developers concrete representations of abstract structures. The data structures for PML are presented first since they support most of the library. A summary of the mathematical functions comes next. A set of examples completes this manual.