🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <ktvca3INNdta@alhena.usc.edu> ajayshah@alhena.usc.edu (Ajay Shah) writes:
>purvis@mulab.physiol.upenn.edu (bedenbaugh) writes:
>
>
>>A recent subroutine collection companion to Abramowitz and Stegun is
>
>>Louis Baker,
>>_C Mathematitcal Function Handbook_
>>McGraw-Hill
>>1992
>
>
>Just one question.  I saw a pair of books of C numanal some time ago.
>One of them is named something like "C toolchest" and on the cover is
>a vise, and the 2nd is the sequel.  I thought they are really terrible
>books.  Does this guy have anything to do with it?  (I was bothered by
>"other books": there aren't too many books of the sort or I would have
>heard of Mr. Baker).
>

Yes: the author seems to be the same.  The above book is not great
literature, though its routines are potentially useful.
 
>>The book comes with a floppy disk with programs for each function.  I have
>Is the source code in the public domain?  I.e., if I write a program
>which uses them, can I post functions used on the net?
>
>(The big screwup with Numerical Recipes is that unlike (say) Linpack
>it is not PD.  So if you plan to share your work with others you
>can't use NR).
>

The Numerical Recipes software has worse problems than its copywrite.
Do you really want to share NR code ? The NR people give anyone who
reads the book permission to have a machine readable copy.  Besides
their main goal is teaching programming, not publishing a subroutine
library. 

The Baker book is copywrited.  This is more of a problem for it since
it has little to recomend it beyond the code.  On P. 740 Baker writes,
in reference to an included cross referencing program

"Taking a cue from the Free Software Foundation, I should copyleft
this program. Having difficulty telling my right from my left, let me
introduce the concep of _copysideways_.  If you have read this far,
you are deemed to have implicitly agreed to any licensing agreement I
care to invent. (Just kidding. But remember, _all_ of this book and
the associated software is copywrited.)"

The accompanying disk says "Opening this disk package constitutes
acceptance of the terms on the opposit page...". The opposit page is
blank. 

Buying the book is 1-2 orders of magnitude cheaper than buying
Mathematica, though, depending on what you run Mathematica on. (It
doesn't do as much as Mathematica, of course.)

>>The people at Quantum Books (an excellent technical bookstore)
>>in Philadelphia tell me that Baker's books have not sold well here or
>Could it just be poor publicity?  Or are the books poor?
>

Probably because the books are poor.  Check them out though if you
need special functions code for things in Abromowitz and Stegun.

Purvis
purvis@mulab.physiol.edu