I may be mistaken, but don't ATLAS, BLAS, LINPACK etc. only operate on single and double precision floats? What if the elements you're operating on are, say, ra

I may be mistaken, but don't ATLAS, BLAS, LINPACK etc. only operate on single and double precision floats? What if the elements you're operating on are, say, rationals or polynomials? Somehow it seemed to me that linear algebra is a somewhat more abstract concept than what Fortran numerical libraries usually tend to implement. Also, the drawback of anything written in this way is that it doesn't compose well. The individual operations may well have been optimized into oblivion, but their composition may not necessarily be what you'd like it to be. One can also say goodbye to higher-order functions. But I'm not exactly a Fortran person when it comes to code style, so I may be prejudiced against overly loopy code. (BTW, am I the only one who thinks that the Sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/math-atlas/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/math-atlas/) comments are machine-generated? I mean, comments like "An essential Windows program." or "The best program that I've ever used." are hardly what I'd expect for a numerical library.)