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August 2011

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[GSLL-devel] Antik, a Common Lisp system that provides a foundation for scientific and engineering computation
by Liam Healy 18 Aug '11

18 Aug '11

Hello GSLLers, Over the past eight months or so, I have been working on a new Lisp system to provide common definitions useful for a variety of scientific and engineering computing. It is called "Antik" and it is now ready to be used by others. Though I say "new", in reality, much of it is old, as it is composed of two parts: one are the grid and foreign-array modules that were already required by GSLL (and formerly supplied by the GSD repository), and the other consist of several modules, most of which I have written over the past decade or more and used myself but never made public. These include elementary generic mathematical functions, physical dimension quantities (i.e., computation with units), and simplified interfaces to some GSLL functions. There are other, less well developed modules, such as one to help organize computation, that I hope will get more complete in the future. There is detailed documentation for the mature parts of Antik. The homepage for Antik is http://www.common-lisp.net/project/antik/. Because Antik has all the grid definitions from GSD, GSLL now uses Antik instead of GSD, and GSD is now obsolete. The grid definitions are for the most part the same as before, with a few changes. First, grid:aref is preferred to grid:gref for grid element access, though the latter is still supported. The reader macro #m by default expands to generate CL arrays, but this can easily be changed to expanding to foreign arrays by changing grid:*default-grid-type*, which GSLL does on loading. Since GSLL needs the grid and foreign-array modules, and most GSLL users are interested in broader scientific computing tasks than just GSL, I thought I would let you know about Antik via this mailing list. If you load GSLL using git, you will need to load Antik from the git repository (see http://repo.or.cz/w/antik.git) If you load GSLL using quicklisp, you will need to wait a bit until the next update, which should automatically bring in the right systems. An independent change to GSLL is that there is no longer a separate system gsll-tests that needs to be loaded. Instead, the tests are defined by an asdf-system-connections system, so that if gsll and lisp-unit are both loaded (in either order), the tests will be defined. When convenient, please switch to the new GSLL and Antik. Your comments are welcome; there is a mailing list for Antik at http://common-lisp.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/antik-devel. Liam

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