Ops Review

[chromatic]

On Monday 19 January 2009 14:13:22 Bob Rogers wrote:

>    On Monday 19 January 2009 13:41:21 Bob Rogers wrote:
>    >    Math ops:
>    >            - ceil/floor
>    >            - transcendental ops
>    >            - gcd/lcm/fact
>    >
>    > What are you suggesting as replacements?  Or (with the probable
>    > exception of fact) must every language reinvent these wheels?
>
>    I had in mind the idea that they could become members of a PBC library.

> Do you think that would be fast enough?  The usual way for dynamic
> languages to get fast compiled numeric code is to bind variables to
> hardware types at compile time, and then inline numeric operations in
> order to use that information.  That seems to require op_i_i_i and
> op_n_n_n versions of these ops, which are not language-dependent.

I don't see how Parrot can be fast enough in general without JIT.  With JIT, 
if these ops are implemented in terms of other ops, there's no speed penalty.

>    And possibly of other ops as well.  Speed should certainly not be an
> issue for Parrot 1.0, so I can see not wanting to add new numeric ops,
> but I don't see the point of removing ops we already have only to decide
> we need them later.

That's a fair point, though it can be difficult to remove ops later.

-- c