Re: [pure-lang-users] case

[Eddie R. <er...@bm...>]

On Fri, 2008-08-29 at 22:43 +0200, Albert Graef wrote:

> To avoid having Pure depend on GSL, I can hopefully just replicate the 
> memory allocation and view functionality from GSL and massage them for 
> my needs (I probably need to add a reference counter to the gsl_matrix 
> and vector structs in order to support contiguous slices in an efficient 
> way). I'll also expose the interface to the Pure matrix and vector data 
> in the public runtime API, so that you have easy access to it from C, too.
> 
> I still have some other stuff on my TODO list right now (specifically, I 
> want to add a basic stream implementation a la SICP to the library), but 
> I can hopefully start working on the vector/matrix stuff some time next 
> week.
> 
> > I think that maybe some of the primitive operations like addition,
> > subtraction, multiplication, and a reciprocal function might be handled
> > best internally in Pure though. Before you say no too quickly, let me
> > point out that GSL_BLAS has a bunch of steps involved just to multiply
> > two matrices.
> 
> If we want to replicate this kind of functionality, it can be done just 
> as well in the Pure GSL wrapper. I really think that all linear algebra 
> functionality belongs there, so that we have a clear cut between the 
> interpreter's basic matrix/vector container support and the GSL 
> wrapper's more advanced functionality. Otherwise we'll just end up 
> duplicating stuff.
> 
> So in the Pure vector/matrix support, I want to concentrate on the basic 
> container functionality, including efficient element access and slicing. 
> Pure programmers will then be able to do basic vector/matrix stuff using 
> these operations and the array comprehensions, or they can fire up the 
> GSL wrapper once it's available, to do more advanced stuff and take 
> advantage of the speedy C implementation.

All sounds good to me.

While you work toward that end, I'm going to go a head and wrap the statistical distribution functions. I need those for work. 
Would you be offended if I tried to port your Q ODBC module to Pure?

e.r.