An Intelligent Interface to Numerical Routines

. Links from Computer Algebra Systems to Numerical Libraries have been increasingly made available. However, they remain, like the numerical routines which comprise these libraries, difficult to use by a novice and there is little help in choosing the appropriate routine for any given problem, should there be a choice. Computer Algebra Systems use generic names for each problem area. For example, `integrate' (or `int') is used for integration of a function, whatever method the code may use. Numeric interfaces still use different names for each method together with a variety of extra parameters, some of which may be optional. Ideally, we should extend the generic name structure to cover numerical routines. This would then, necessarily, require algorithms for making an assessment of the efficacy of different methods where such a choice exists. This paper considers the link to the NAG Fortran Library from version 2.0 of Axiom and shows how we can build on this to extend and simplify the i..