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eigen in beta

Paul Gilbert wrote:
Well, there's make check-all... 

That doesn't check everything either, though. The point is that there is 
a limit to what we can check: We don't check whether the CPU gets 
floating point operations wrong in the 5th decimal place on rare 
occasions either. (Same thing applies to structural engineering: You 
can't test the chemical composition of every steel rod. At some point 
you have to shift reponsibility to your subcontractors.)

We do have regression checks though, i.e. we try to ensure that known 
errors do not reappear, and compiler issues have been worked around 
occasionally. E.g. (IIRC) the original qbeta() function was written so 
as to get the very last bit of accuracy squeezed out of the solution to 
a nonlinear equation, but modern optimizing compilers would reorder some 
instructions, losing a few bits of accuracy and sending  the code into 
an infinite loop in some cases.

    -pd