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MathLib is a PalmOS shared library which makes a complete set of IEEE-754 double-precision math functions available to other PalmPilot applications. These functions include all the standard routines normally accessed by including math.h on other systems, including trigonometry (with inverse and hyperbolic), logarithms, exponentiation, and miscellaneous helper functions. The only standard routines I left out were the Bessel and Gamma functions, which had the poor taste to be both very large and very rarely used. These routines have been ported from the GCC 2.7.2.2 source code for libm.a (which was itself based on free code originally developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.), so this library is free software covered by the GNU Library General Public License.
There are two main advantages to using this library. Firstly, writing floating-point math functions that are reasonably fast, accurate, and robust is so incredibly difficult that few programmers will manage it on their own; hopefully, this library will spark the availability of many new programs for the Pilot that were impossible before.
And secondly, as you can see from the size of this thing, floating-point code on the Pilot takes up a lot of space. Its much better to have a single copy shared between all the programs that need it than to have each application include their own. How many copies of the trig functions (at 20 or 30 KB each) do you really want on your Pilot? |
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