This page is part of the web mail archives of SRFI 25 from before July 7th, 2015. The new archives for SRFI 25 contain all messages, not just those from before July 7th, 2015.
This is a concrete idea for revising the shape representation. At present we have * (shape bound ...) to make arrays that represent shapes * (array-shape arr) to access the shape of the array (array-rank arr) to access the number of dimensions of arr (make-array shape . obj) (array shape obj ...) (share-array arr shape proc) and some language about it not being alright to mutate a shape. Now I propose to replace (array-shape arr) with (array-start arr d) for the start index of arr along dimension d (array-end arr d) for the end index of arr along dimension d and specify only that a (shape bound ...) is suitable input to make-array, array and share-array - in particular, it need not be an array. (It occurred to me that "begin" is not a noun, hence "start". These better be short.) People can easily write array-shape themselves, with the practical advantage that the result will be newly allocated and mutable, together with array->shape to create the corresponding shape object. When people don't need the shape as a data structure, they can write shorter and more transparent code with array-start and array-end. Implementors can represent shapes in arrays more efficiently. -- Jussi