Spline bases for atomic calculations

The use of spline bases has been proposed for ab initio electronic structure calculations. They offer the apparent advantage that no nonlinear parmameters occur, so that exponent optimization is unnecessary, and the number of two-electron integrals in SCF calculations increases only as n2 rather than n4 where n is the number of basis functions. The results of test calculations on the helium atom are reported in this note. Analysis of the computer time required to achieve accuracy comparable to other methods indicates that spline bases are not suitable for SCF calculations