[Aldor-l] [Axiom-developer] Re: exports and constants

[Gabriel Dos Reis]

Jacques Carette <carette at mcmaster.ca> writes:

| If you want a better experience with metaprogramming, I definitely
| recommend MetaOCaml (http://www.metaocaml.org).  Unlike Template
| Haskell, it is fully typed; TH only types the result of the
| generation, not the generator itself [though SimonPJ assures me they
| are working on that too].

I worked also with MetaOcaml -- mostly practically after reading your
paper on Guassian elimination, since earlier encounters were only
through papers.  Though I did Template Haskell (and I continue to do
so) before that, coming from a C++ brackground.  For some reasons, I
still prefer coding in Template Haskell -- I do appreciate MetaOcaml though.

| 
| Gabriel Dos Reis wrote:
| > (On performance side, last month, a colleague of mine and I did some
| > experiments by writing a small Computer Algebra library in Haskell 98
| > and Generic Haskell.  Disappointingly, there is a slowdown factor
| > between 7 and 10 when going from Haskell to Generic Haskell.  We don't
| > know yet which part can be credited to the maturity of the compiler
| > and which part is inherent to the approach.  Anyway, it was an
| > interesting experience).
| Is this experiment available?  I would be quite interested in looking
| at the details.

We do hope to make it publically available very soon.

[...]

| Our basic thesis is that, given the right infrastructure, you can
| structure code like it ought to be structured

yup; and I've been holding that from practical experience for over a
decade of metaprogramming in C++.

| (which is already what
| Axiom/Aldor strives for) and, without relying on the cleverness of
| compiler writers, get optimal efficiency.  For linear algebra, this
| works.  In separate work, it was shown that this works for FFT as
| well.  We are currently extending the work to handle (numeric) solving
| of LODEs.

I'm awaiting to read it -- looking very interesting!

-- Gaby