Re: Low level things in C or Scheme [was Stupid module and pregexp questions]

[tomas@fabula.de]

On Tue, Apr 29, 2003 at 01:35:21PM -0400, Thamer Al-Harbash wrote:
> On Tue, 29 Apr 2003 tomas@fabula.de wrote:
> 
> > Of course, if we can have our cake and eat it, I'm all for it, but I'm
> > comfortable with the idea of a layered system where you do the low-level
> > things in one language and the high-level things in another. It correlates
> > quite well with the layering of software and thus feels (to me) very
> > natural.
> 
> It's funny you should talk about layering. I've recently started
> writing a project at work (or re-writing for the Nth time thanks
> to changes being requested), and I chose doing the high level
> work in guile just so I could say "ok done," and get back to more
> important things.
> 
> The funny thing is, thanks to guile's seamless use of arbitrarily
> big numbers (its numerical tower), I don't know if I *want* to do
> my number crunching in C anymore. This project is slowly becoming
> 100% scheme as I remove the final bits of C from it.
> 
> I have not noticed any significant penalty in performance.

That's good news -- and as MJ Ray and me discussed off list, writing
everything in Scheme makes the application much more hackable (remember
the hacktivation energy?). I would just argue for considering well-defined
``library'' stuff, like bignums, regexps, matrix algebra, what not, for
implementation in a ``lower layer''. And then to design a good interface
(since it'll be more static, much care has to go into that). And then
to reconsider. And then may be to do it.

Performance -- well, only if you are forced to :-)

Regards
-- tomas


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