Chris wrote in part: -----Original Message----- From: numpy-discussion-admin@lists.sourceforge.net [mailto:numpy-discussion-admin@lists.sourceforge.net] On Behalf Of Christos Siopis <siopis@umich.edu> Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 11:53 PM To: numpy-discussion@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [Numpy-discussion] Meta: too many numerical libraries doing the same thing? <snip> In essence, what i am 'proposing' is for a big umbrella organization (NSF, NASA and IEEE come to mind) to sponsor the development of this uber-library for numerical scientific and engineering applications. This would be 'sold' as an infrastructure project: creating the essential functionality that is needed in order to build most kinds of scientific and engineering applications. It would save lots of duplication effort and improve productivity and quality at government labs, academia and the private sector alike. The end product would have some sort of open-source license (this can be a thorny issue, but i am sure a mutually satisfactory solution can be found). ----------- Those who do not know history, etc. LLNL, LANL, and Sandia had such a project in the 70s called the SLATEC library for mathematical software. It was pretty successful for the Fortran era. However, the funding agencies are unable to maintain interest in infrastructure very long. If there came a day when the vast majority of scientific programmers shared a platform and a language, there is now the communications infrastructure so that they could do a good open-source library, given someone to lead it with some vision. Linus Mathguy.