LINBOX: A GENERIC LIBRARY FOR EXACT LINEAR ALGEBRA
Jean‐Guillaume Dumas, Thierry Gautier, Mark W. Giesbrecht, Pascal Giorgi, Bradford Hovinen, Erich Kaltofen, B. David Saunders, William J. Turner, Gilles Villard · 2002
Base Class pointers Concrete Field virtual functions Field Archetype Linbox field archetype Figure 1: Black box design. The LinBox black box matrix archetype is simpler than the field archetype because the design constraints are less stringent. As with the field type, we need a common object interface to describe how algorithms are to access black box matrices, but it only requires functions to access the matrix's dimensions and to apply the matrix or its transpose to a vector. Thus our black box matrix archetype is simply an abstract class, and all actual black box matrices are subclasses of the archetype class. We note that the overhead involved with this inheritance mechanism is negligible in comparison with the execution time of the methods, unlike for our field element types.