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Re: Not quite enough abstraction

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.



Jussi Piitulainen <jpiitula@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
> Brad Lucier writes:
> > This is a side comment about this SRFI.

> > So I looked at Alan Bawden's code and this SRFI.  And it turns out
> > that neither is at a high enough abstraction level to really
> > simplify my life.

> They are essentially the same.

Well, sort of. I think that my biggest problem is with
make-array. However, I don't think there's a real issue here.

> I think I have a good answer to your concern about working at the
> level of individual elements. The answer is that these operations are
> just the primitives that should be used to write the higher level
> operations. 

No bother. Olin Shivers spoiled us all with SRFI-1. The combinator
work *needs* to be done, though. If not in this SRFI, then in a
rapidly appearing follow-on.

> > Both assume that there are underlying arrays that are mutable, you
> > can set! elements of the arrays, the underlying arrays are generic
> > containers (vectors, not f64vectors or f32vectors, ...), etc.

I don't see this depth of assumptions. Brad seems to be bringing up
two orthogonal issues:

        1) mutability
        2) type-safety

The mutability assumtption is present, and it worries me. However, it
doesn't worrk me that much because I'm looking for a
categorically-standard spec. Err...internal jargon that: I'm looking
for a spec that I can plug-n-play alternate implementations for
specific problems. e.g. I'm working (low prio) on some large, sparse
matrix code for doing latent semantic indexing tricks. My arrays are
*not* going to be writable, but I don't care much because I won't be
writing to them. However, I *can* use the SRFI array spec in the
meantime to test my algorithms on small datasets.

The type-safety issue is built in to Scheme. If you're not going to
drive safely, you'd better not get into this car. I just don't see any
other way around it...

> The next question will be whether to finalize or withdraw.

Yes, that is a next question.

david rush
-- 
The important thing is victory, not persistence.
	-- the Silicon Valley Tarot