this patch removes the in-file lists in favor of a global list of in
the COPYING file. this is done because (a) maintaining a list of
authors at the beginning of each source file is a major pain in the
a**, (b) for this reason, the list of authors was not accurate in
about 85% of all cases where more than one person was involved and (c)
this list is not legally binding in any way (the copyright is at the
person who authored a given change; if these lists had any legal
relevance, one could "aquire" the copyright of the module by forking
it and replacing the lists...)
for some unit tests the precision of `float` is insufficient. To at
least enforce that the tested code compiles with `float` as Scalar,
they are wrapped by `while(false)` statements.
most of these people like to inflict pain on themselfs (i.e., warnings
in their own code), but they usually don't like if pain is inflicted
on them by others (i.e., warnings produced by external code which they
use). This patch should make these kinds of people happy. I'm not
really sure if the code is easier to understand with this, but at
least clang does not complain for most of the warnings of
"-Weverything" anymore.
The basic idea is to replace "plain" scalar values by "function
evaluations": these store the function's value plus a set of
derivatives for it and the chain rule is used to "drag" the
derivatives along.
So far, the framework only implements the "forward" approach to
automatic differentiation and expression templates are not supported
yet. (The latter point may change in the furture, though.)
"local" means that the framework uses static arrays to represent the
derivatives, i.e. the number of derivatives which are required must be
specified at compile time. Compared to dynamic arrays this improves
efficiency considerably if function evaluation objects must be
allocated and deallocated frequently.
