Re: ARPACK sources removed from Octave

[John W. Eaton]

On  4-Jan-2012, Rik wrote:

| Alas, the new test does not fail with a bad ARPACK library.  Is there a
| reason to have the test written in Fortran and not C++?  The C++ version
| was already debugged, but if we really want the configure test in Fortran
| we can continue.

I did it to avoid issues of portability when mixing Fortran and C++.
For example, you appended underscores to the Fortran names, but not
all compilers do that.  You also used lower-case names, but some
Fortran compilers use translate the Fortran function names to upper
case.  Then there are different conventions for passing character
strings.  So to make the test work for all Fortran compilers that
might be used to compile ARPACK, we need to handle those issues.  It
seemed simpler to just avoid all that and use an all Fortran test.

jwe