overview

Motivation

This library was created to be linked against libcff, a library to approximate functions using continued fraction approximations. libcff was originally written for the MpIeee class, which is not available for download. So this library provides a replacement until MpIeee will finally be released.

Interface

The libmplite interface isn’t exactly the same as the one of MpIeee. One of the reasons is that I wanted to experiment with another coding standard. But a simple ‘#include <SubstMpIeee.hh>’ in your source files will make libmplite ‘MpIeee compatible’.

All classes and functions are contained in a namespace Johan, because I wanted to experiment with namespaces, but I didn’t find a better name for my namespace :-)

System requirements

The library is known to work under Red Hat Linux 9.0 and Debian GNU/Linux 3.0. In fact it should work under any Linux or *BSD, provided that you installed mpfr, GNU make, and a recent C++ compiler (e.g. gcc 3).

Before you can use this library, gmp and mpfr have to be installed on your system. We recommend to use version 2.0.3 or later of mpfr, because previous versions suffer from some naughty bugs.

Download

• libmplite-0.6.1.tar.gz (239 K)

Installation instructions

This library is installed the ‘standard GNU way’ :

1. Unpack the archive
2. cd to the libmplite-x.x directory, and run ‘./configure’ script.
3. Run ‘make’ to build the library, and ‘make install’ to install it. (If you are using FreeBSD, you might need ‘gmake’ instead of ‘make’

If you don't want a ‘standard installation’, you can provide some parameters to configure. Enter ‘./configure --help’ for a list of available options.

Build problems

There are some known build problems under FreeBSD.

• If the configure script doesn't find mpfr.h, you should assign ‘-I /usr/local/include’ to the CPPFLAGS environment variable. (Assuming that mpfr.h is in /usr/local/include.) E.g.
   $ export CPPFLAGS="-I /usr/local/include" (for sh)
   $ setenv CFLAGS "-I /usr/local/include" (for csh)
  
• If LDFLAGS is set, the library will not link. So
   $ unset LDFLAGS (for sh)
   $ unsetenv LDFLAGS (for csh)
  
• If the configure script complains about running ltconfig with the --no-verify option, search the configure file for this option, and remove it.

Documentation

For the moment, there is no documentation available, except what you can find in the header file MpLite.h.

You can also look at this example program, which is nothing more than the conversion of an mpfr example to libmplite. If you did a standard install, you can compile this file using

• g++ example.cc -lmplite -lmpfr -lgmp (Linux)
• g++ example.cc -I/usr/local/include -L/usr/local/lib -lmplite -lmpfr -lgmp (*BSD)

Known bugs

• All bugs of mpfr are included in mplite, and there are even additional bugs :-)
• Signed zeros are ignored
• This library isn't extensively tested. So there are probably a lot of undiscovered bugs

Projects using libmplite

Libmplite is used in libcff, a C++ continued fractions toolkit, and in libmultival, a multiprecision C++ interval class.

Credits

• Research group Computer Arithmetic and Numerical Techniques
• FWO Vlaanderen

Contact

For bugfixes, suggestions, questions, more information,... : johan@linux.be

Copyright (c) 2003 Johan Vervloet.

Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts.

Modified: 27 September 2006