SLATEC


What is ...

SLATEC is a collection of some 1400 FORTRAN routines that solve a variety of scientific problems. It incorporates routines from BSPLINE, EISPACK, FFTPACK, FNLIB, QUADPACK, SLAP, and other packages. The acronym stands for: Sandia, Los Alamos, Air Force Weapons Laboratory Technical Exchange Committee.

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Content ...

SLATEC adopts GAMS (Guide to Available Mathematical Software) for classifying its routines. GAMS is a hierarchical classification with the following top level:

 A.  Arithmetic, error analysis
 C.  Elementary and special functions (see also L5)
 D.  Linear Algebra
 E.  Interpolation
 F.  Solution of nonlinear equations
 G.  Optimization (see also K and L8)
 H.  Differentiation, integration
 I.  Differential and integral equations
 J.  Integral transforms
 K.  Approximation (see also L8)
 L.  Statistics, probability
 N.  Data handling (see also L2)
 R.  Service routines
 Z.  Other

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How to ...

In order to invoke (or call) a SLATEC routine, you must first find out its name and then determine its API (parameters, returns, etc.).

Your first stop should be the detailed table of contents, which is stored in the file \F\SLATEC\DOC\toc of the download package, and which is reproduced here for your convenience. You can either follow the GAMS classification, level by level, until you find a routine that solves your problem or use the search facility of your browser to look for keywords pertaining to your problem. This will ultimately leads to the routine's name. Note that SLATEC contains several variants of the same routine differing only in the types of data they take. These (overloaded) routines have the same name except for a one-letter prefix: S for single precision real numbers, D for double precision real numbers, C for complex numbers, I for integers, L for logical, and H for strings.

For example, if you are interested in factorials, you can either start with classification C (Elementary and special functions) and climb down the levels or simply search for "factorial". Either way, this will lead you to FAC and DFAC as two variants (one returns single and the other double precision) of the SLATEC factorial routine.

Once you know the name of the routine, you find its API in the file: name.f.html. Hence, for the double precision factorial function, you look in dfac.f.html. All these API files are stored in the \F\SLATEC\DOC directory of the download package, and is also available on line here. The file tells you whether this is a function or a subroutine, what exactly does it do, what parameters it expects and what does it return, and information about the routine's author, algorithm, and revision history.

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Examples ...

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F@Y/HR/S03