[Shootout-list] Organisation for numerical tests

[Sebastien Loisel]

Hi,

First, I apologize for not being super responsive lately, I've been
busy. This is a proposal to better organize the numerical tests,
inspired from the discussions on the list.

The 10-line tests are relatively well organized -- they test specific
things and the set of things to be tested is sort of standard. The 100
line tests don't have that luxury so they seem more haphazard. Tests
like implicitode are primary examples -- it doesn't look like any
other numerical test out there and yet the shootout doesn't test
bread-and-butter numerical algorithms.

So instead of continuing like this, I propose that we choose a set of
numerical algorithm, with sample implementations in MATLAB or octave
(the reason is that 10 lines of MATLAB is 100 lines of C or Fortran.)
This way everyone can understand what's going on, instead of just the
specialists reading long ocaml codes. Once we've selected the things
we want to test (for instance, four of them), we do a few
implementations and stick the into the shootout. Conversely, we look
at which tests are currently considered "numerical" and kick out any
that we haven't selected.

What do you think?

Sebastien Loisel