GNU Scientific Library 1.8 released

Version 1.8 of the GNU Scientific Library (GSL) is now available.  GSL
provides a large collection of functions for numerical computing in C.

This is a maintenance release with bug fixes and performance
improvements.  Discrete cumulative distribution functions have also
been added.  The full NEWS file entry is appended below.

The file details are:

  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gsl/gsl-1.8.tar.gz      (2.3 MB)
  ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gsl/gsl-1.8.tar.gz.sig  (GPG signature)
  c60a5d193cc6b472496ff191744fc306              (MD5 checksum)

The GSL project home page is at http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/
GSL is free software distributed under the GNU General Public
License.

Thanks to everyone who reported bugs and contributed improvements.

-- 
Brian Gough
(GSL Maintainer)

Network Theory Ltd 
Commercial support for GSL --- http://www.network-theory.com/gsl/

----------------------------------------------------------------------

* What is new in gsl-1.8:

** Added an error check to trap multifit calls with fewer observations
than parameters.  Previously calling the multifit routines with n<p
would cause invalid memory access.

** Added the Debye unit to physical constants.

** Added cumulative distribution functions for the discrete
distributions, including binomial, poisson, geometric, negative
binomial, pascal and hypergeometric.

** Added the functions gsl_cdf_beta_{Pinv,Qinv} and
gsl_cdf_fdist_{Pinv,Qinv} for computing the inverse of the cumulative
beta and F distributions.

** Added the multilinear fit estimator function gsl_multifit_linear_est
for computing model values and their errors.

** Avoid division by zero in gsl_multimin_fdfminimizer_vector_bfgs
if the step-size becomes too small.

** Users on DEC Alpha systems will need to specify their desired IEEE
arithmetic options via CFLAGS when building the library, as these are
no longer added automatically.

** Added new random variate generators gsl_ran_gaussian_ziggurat
and gsl_ran_gamma_mt for the Gaussian and Gamma distributions based on
the Marsaglia-Tsang ziggurat and fast gamma methods.

** Improved the speed of the exponential power distribution
gsl_ran_exppow.

** Improved the speed of the Gaussian ratio method by adding quadratic
bounds in gsl_ran_gaussian_ratio_method.

** Added an extra term to the taylor series of the synchrotron
functions gsl_sf_synchrotron_1 and gsl_sf_synchrotron_2 for small x to
ensure smooth matching with the chebyshev expansion.

** The binomial pdf gsl_ran_binomial_pdf now handles the cases p=0
and p=1 and is more accurate for the case of small p with k=0.

** Fixed the spherical bessel function gsl_sf_bessel_jl_e) to limit
the use of gsl_sf_bessel_Jnu_asympx_e to the range x>100*l*l to
satisfy he requirement x>>l*l in the asymptotic expansion.

** The scaled bessel function gsl_sf_bessel_In_scaled now handles
larger arguments x > 1e7 correctly for n < 150 using the uniform
asymptotic expansion instead of the continued fraction expansion.

** The functions gsl_stats_min/max now return NaN if the data contains
NaN. Similarly, the functions gsl_stats_min/max_index return the index
of the first occurring NaN in the data when it contains a NaN.

** Fixed an invalid memory access that caused incorrect results for
the special case in periodic cubic spline interpolation of 3 points.

** Added Debye functions for n=5 and n=6

** Added the missing functions gsl_spline_name() and
gsl_spline_min_size()

** The function gsl_rng_uniform_int(r,n) now returns an error for n=0,
which can occur when passing an unsigned integer value of 2^32.