Splines and Gaussians Higher-order splines all mostly look like Gaussians. I wonder how higher-order splines (from 3rd order onwards) and Gaussians differ.  How can one  differentiate them?
If you talk about standard splines, piecewise polynomial, without tricks like orthogonalisation, they ought to have finite support. Not the case with Gaussians. As said by @Atul Ingle, derivability is another criterion, but might be more difficult to address on discrete data.