> As a kind of apology for this state of affairs, the functions attempt > to estimate errors, using heuristic and sometimes ill-defined methods. > This turns out to be a poor apology, since it tends to gum-up the > works for the whole sublibrary, eating performance and occupying > a large piece of intellectual real estate. > > The error estimation code must, at the least, be factored out. More > to the point, is should likely be discarded in the main line of > development. Other notions of error control should be investigated.
I have found the error estimates to be pretty useful when debugging, and they are only a small extra cost. Some of the hypergeometric functions are difficult to understand in places. Here it would be good to have an explicit higher-level version of the C implementation, for example in Maxima, that one could test against and understand more easily.
