In numerical analysis, elementary function membership, like special function membership, is ambiguous. In many circumstances, it’s entirely reasonable to describe the natural logarithm as a special function.
> Remember the whole point of fair use is to benefit society by allowing reuse of material in ways that don't directly copy large portions of the material verbatim.
If you care exclusively about numerical stability and performance, why _this_ set of operators (e.g., there’re plenty of good reasons to include expm1 or log1p and certainly trigonometric functions)? It’d be an interesting research problem to measure and identify the minimal subset of operators (and I suspect it’d look differently than what you’d expect from an FPU).
If you care exclusively about minimalism, why not limit yourself to the Meijer-G function (or some other general-purpose alternative)?
It was very primitive. It was essentially a mechanism for composing operations on vectors. I don’t know for certain but I would guess that it was inspired by IBM and their work on APL.
The most popular today outside of the shell environment is the statistical environment “S.” John Chambers would recreate it as “R” and I understand that it’s very popular and does a nice job of performing statistics and graphics together.
The other environment that is still popular today is the “statistical environment” that Rick Becker, Allan Wilks, and John Chambers created. It eventually became “S” and John would essentially recreate it as “R.” It’s a very nice environment for performing statistics and graphics together.
I was at Bell during the options “debate.” I think something that this otherwise wonderful article misses is that some believed that commands were never intended to be the only way to use the system as the shell was intended to be just one of the many user interfaces that Research Unix would provide. From that perspective, it was entirely reasonable to believe that if a command was so complex that it needed options than it was likely more appropriate for one of the other user interfaces. I believe this is unfortunately now understood by some as it shouldn’t exist. However, because of the seemingly instantaneous popularity of the shell and pipelining text it became synonymous with Unix. It’s a shame because McIlroy had a lot of interesting ideas around pipelining audio and graphics that, as far as I know, never materialized.