In this paper, we study the problem of unique interpolation and approximation by a class of spline functions,L-splines, containing as special cases the deficient and generalized spline functions ofAhlberg, Nilson, andWalsh [3, 5, 6], the Chebyshevian spline functions ofKarlin andZiegler [27], and the piecewise Hermite polynomial functions, as considered in [17]. We first give sufficient conditions for unique interpolation byL-spline functions in Section 2. Then, we obtain newL ? andL 2 error estimates for interpolation byL-splines in Section 4, and show that these error estimates are, in a certain sense, sharp. In addition, we make a similar study for theg-splines ofSchoenberg, cf. [44, 3], in Section 5. In Section 6, an application of these new error estimates is made to the analysis of the error made in the use of finite dimensional subspaces ofL-splines andg-splines. in the Rayleigh-Ritz procedure for the class of nonlinear two-point boundary value problems studied in [17]. Because of the rapid growth of the number of papers devoted to or connected with the topic of splines, we believe that a compilation of papers on splines for the reader's use is desirable, and such a list is found in the References at the end of this paper.