[Python-3000] adding gamma and error functions to math module (original) (raw)

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Tue Jul 15 10:27:39 CEST 2008

On Tue, Jul 15, 2008 at 9:10 AM, nirinA raseliarison <nirina at mail.blueline.mg> wrote:

gammas and errors functions are available from the C standard library. it would be nice to have them in the math module. or is there any reason not to include them?

One reason is that they're probably not available on all platforms; these functions are part of the C99 standard, and not everyone has caught up with all the little details of C99 yet. In particular, I wouldn't be surprised to learn that these functions still weren't available on Windows. We had this problem when adding the inverse hyperbolic trig functions to Python 2.6.

I don't know whether it would be acceptable to expose these functions to Python only on those platforms that have support for them in the C library.

Writing explicit code for these functions, for platforms whose libm doesn't support them, would be a fairly major task. Stealing code (in an appropriately legal fashion) from somewhere else might work.

In any case, if you're interested in getting these in to 2.7/3.1 (it's too late for 2.6/3.0) then I'd suggest opening a feature request at bugs.python.org. (And assign it to me, if you like.)

Mark

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