[ChangeSet] Beta function...

[John W. Eaton]

On 18-Mar-2008, David Bateman wrote:

| John W. Eaton wrote:
| > On 18-Mar-2008, David Bateman wrote:
| > | The attached version might be better as the reason I used the function
| > | name xclgamma was that I was trying to have a function like
| > | 
| > | extern Complex xclgamma (double);
| > | 
| > | but that is not possible to use within the current mapper
| > | framework..
| > 
| 
| <snip proposed change>
| 
| > What do you think?  Is this change worth making?
| 
| Frankly I think the overhead of converting to a complex argument and
| then back to a real argument for the few cases that need this is minimal
| compared to the cost of calling the mapper function itself, and so there
| will probably be little to gain by this in terms of performance. The
| only reason I can see to do it is if you consider it a cleaner
| implementation, which it arguably might be.
| 
| > Also, it would be good to have the same mechanism working in the
| > Sparse classes.  If you don't have time, I could take a look at it and
| > propose a patch if you could review it.
| 
| I'm not sure its worth the effort, and I'd propose just to use the
| lgamma patch as is.

OK, for now I applied the patch as is.

My question about the Sparse classes was whether we should convert it
to use template-based functor classes for the map functions the way
the Array classes do now.  Are you interested in doing that, or would
you like for me to look at it?

Thanks,

jwe