The GSL library was implemented using the C language. This implies that each function uses a certain type for the different variables and are fixed to one specific type. The wrapper will try to convert each argument to the approbriate C type. The PyGSL interface tries to follow it as much as possible but only as far as resonable. For example the definition of the poly_eval function in C is given by
const double C[], const int LEN, const double X) |
The corresponding python wrapper was implemented by
C, x) |
Default arguments are used to allocate workspaces on the fly if not provided by the user. Consider for example the fft module. The function for the real forward transform is named
double DATA[], size_t STRIDE, size_t N, const gsl_fft_real_wavetable * WAVETABLE, gsl_fft_real_workspace * WORK ) |
The corresponding python wrapper is found in the fft module called real_transform
data, [space, table, output]) |