Special functions in {R}: introducing the gsl package

Abstract

The Gnu Scientific Library (GSL) is a collection of numerical routines for scientific computing (Galassi et al., 2005). The routines are written in C and constitute a library for C programmers; the source code is distributed under the GNU General Public License. One stated aim of the GSL development effort is the development of wrappers for high level languages. Here I introduce gsl, an R package that allows direct access to many GSL functions, including all the special functions, from within an R session. The package is available on CRAN, at http://www.cran.r-project.org/; the GSL is available at http://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/.